Right now, I’m impatiently waiting to discover the result of my glueing job last night… I glued the veneer to the top, using the same procedure as with the test piece, but since it’s such a large area I found it very difficult to get everything done before open clamp time expired and I’m not sure I used the right amount of glue and if I got enough clamping pressure (I used 12 clamps and two 3/4" thick boards of MDF to divide pressure). I practiced the whole setup before I started glueing, but it still stays a nerve-racking job…

After leaving everything for about one hour, I removed all clamps and cleaned up the excess glue and removed the masking tape that held the two halves of veneer together. Then I put everything back in clamps with new pieces of wax paper. This way, I have less change my MDF clamp cauls get glued to the working piece and I’ve got less lumps of glue around my working piece when it’s completely dried out.

I noticed two things: because of the glue, the moisture content of the maple board increased massively on the side of the veneer, causing it to bend like crazy… with two of those tops I could’ve made a drum . The other thing was that the edges of the glue joint weren’t closed very well, but that’s somewhat logical, because the pressure was applied on the contour of the body, not on the edges of the whole board.

Tonight I might have time to cut out the top and that’s when I’m going to find out if I succeeded in getting such a nice glue joint as I did on the much smaller test piece.