Monday 21 July 2014

Tidy up and Splicing Yew Billets

I had a good tidy yesterday as I had a couple of people drop in for a chat and a play with the bows. Today I cut splices into a couple of pairs of Yew billets.
I'd had a couple of splices fail last year, so this time I did a Z splice rather than a simple V as it gives more glue area. The length of the splice is about 4", generally a V splice needs to be longer (possibly I left 'em too short on the failures last year)
As I glued up the first I noticed the glue starting to gel after about 15 minutes (I'd mixed it and was just fine tuning the splice). It should stay workable for 3 hours, mind it's a warm day.
Reading the instructions on the Resintite it says once opened the shelf life is 12 months... whoops I've had it about 4 years. Mind a lot of this shelf life stuff is tosh... why would the shelf life of some glue correspond exactly with the time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun? Someone just pulled that figure out of their backside!

Anyhow I popped down to Toolstation to buy some more... bugger... they no longer stock it. Pencil in a long and tedious rant about how, as soon as you find a decent product it disappears. Anyhow I drove down to Screwfix... no joy. Got home tried to order some online. Just about to click confirm when I noticed figures roughly like this.
Product £7
Shipping £6
vat £5 ..
Total £ 26
What????  So I order it by phone instead.
It's irritating as it comes in 1.5kg tubs which is far too much.
Of course I then find some on E-bay cheaper in 500g tubs (serves me right for looking).
Anyhow I think Resintite, Cascamite, Extramite etc are all the same stuff.

I keep the offcuts from splicing as they are V handy for tapping into a saw cut to hold it open when bandsawing, or for wedging things at a slight angle when clamping them up etc.
Enough waffle here are the pics (BTW I'm less grumpy now) The pic on the right shows them both dry assembled prior to gluing. Dunno if you can see, they will both have a hint of reflex which will doubtless pull out during tillering.

2 comments:

  1. Hey Derek Wondered if you'd ever tried Titebond. I've used Titebond 111 ( 3) and had success with it. It's waterproof as well.
    Paul

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  2. Hi, I've used it in the past but it's a bit expensive.

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