Glue

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Scott Walker

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Hi all.

I'm making snooker cues as a hobby and wondered on glue options for mainly joining ebony to ash.

I've used titebond 2 and gorilla glue. I prefer titebond, but wondered if there were better options.

I've seen a mention if hot glue in BBC repair shop and wondered if that would be better.
 
I use mainly hot hide glue for luthiery because it has advantages there - easy reversibility with heat and moisture (if eg I don't align a seam quite right), ease of repair, easy cleanup, near-invisible glue line (if I'm on song). Its biggest disadvantage is that for larger joints you have to pre-heat the wood, otherwise the glue will gel before you get the joint aligned and clamped and then it will fail.

For a snooker cue I'd say that disadvantage is a major one. Liquid hide glue would probably work OK though.

As a snooker cue is a largely unstressed joint you could use pretty much anything, so I'd choose on the basis of how easy it is to work with and clean up, and how good-looking a glue line I could get. I'd probably use Titebond Original, as I'm used to that and wouldn't need flexibility or water resistance (as in the other Titebond flavours).

For ebony fretboards some luthiers use epoxy, because ebony can move quite a bit from the moisture in other glues. But fretboards are only 3mm or so thick and I doubt a much thicker snooker cue blank would move much. If though you're having problems with joints curling open at their edges, that's likely because of movement caused by moisture and epoxy might be your solution.
 
Which Gorilla glue are you using? Gorilla is a brand, not a glue type. If you mean the foaming PU that made their name then that and Titebond 2 are both fine adhesives – both are capable of creating joints stronger than the wood, which is all we could ask for.

But you might want to look at epoxy anyway. Epoxy has some advantages over what we think of as 'woodworking glues' in that it doesn't require high clamp pressure to achieve strong joints (which both foaming PU and PVA do) and this may offer some advantages in putting together cues.
 
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