Drying Glue on Wood Veneer

Video Transcript

"As we put the veneer. Once we put the glue in there, we're ready to go. We've got our iron on hot. Just a standard iron you buy pretty much anywhere, any department store. We're going to apply the heat directly to the surface of the veneer. Basically just like you're ironing a shirt or handkerchief or anything. If you look toward the edges, you'll see the glue start to come out and with the heat, you'll see it start bubbling. What it's doing, it's evaporating the moisture out of the glue. And in the process it's making it bond to the substrate, which in this case is also mahogany underneath the veneer. We will put gentle pressure on this and moving the iron every once in a while. Keep watching your glue on the edge. As you see the bubbles come to the surface, you know you're getting almost there. And once the bubbles stop forming, you've pretty much eliminated all the moisture and you can stop ironing. Again, back and forth with even pressure. You can even see the bottom of the drawer where the glue's coming out and it's also bubbled. You don't want to just sit here and hold it for several minutes. What will happen is, you'll burn the veneer. So you want to keep the iron moving until, till you see like I said, you see the bubbles coming around the edges. Then we're just about there. We want to cool that surface down. You see how quickly it evaporates. And we know we've got a good surface bond now, and the veneer's down tight. That's just another way to repair a piece of veneer that we're trying to salvage on the drawer and if we're in a hurry we can use an iron. Otherwise, we could have clamped this also and let it sit overnight."