New use for Gorilla Glue

[nosaj]

I was watching This Old House on PBS last night. They were in Hawaii and With a local builder they were making a keepsake box.

They used Mango wood but to seal and clear it they used Gorilla Glue. Couple of dots then rub it in and wipe it once an hr till cured. Made a nice handrubbed finish.

The host were suprised at how well it worked.

nosaj

[Chuck H]

I was watching This Old House on PBS last night. They were in Hawaii and With a local builder they were making a keepsake box.

They used Mango wood but to seal and clear it they used Gorilla Glue. Couple of dots then rub it in and wipe it once an hr till cured. Made a nice handrubbed finish.

The host were suprised at how well it worked.

nosaj

Gorilla makes A LOT of glues. Which one was it? There may yet be consequences since a glue, while it may look fine, it isn't designed to BE a finish. Holding things together and protecting something's surface have a few different criteria. Don't buy into it just because it looks good on TV either. Sometimes a shoot will premise something that doesn't actually work out, so they just fake it because they already have leading footage in the can. That is, there's no way to know a can of spray lacquer wasn't involved

[Leo_Gnardo]

There may yet be consequences since a glue, while it may look fine, it isn't designed to BE a finish.

Mmm, yeah . . . try using that box as a seat in hot damp weather, see what happens. Heh heh heh....

[Chuck H]

It's true enough that some products that started as adhesives have found their way into finishing. CA glues (Super/Crazy Glue) comes to mind. With CA it's more often used as a stabilizer and the resulting surface is so hard it can then be polished. But sometimes it's also finished with a thin coat of the same stuff instead. It's a little finicky about humidity and other drying conditions, but presents as much durability as you can get short of catalyzed epoxy products. As far as the more typical glues I don't know of one I would trust as a finish yet. That doesn't mean it's not possible for some pioneering craftsman to make a convenient discovery. Still... I would think that the manufacturer of any chemistry based product, knowing their concoction is only a stones throw from another marketable angle, would have done some testing and experiments to see if they had something else to sell. And Gorilla hasn't marketed finishes yet. I wouldn't trust it.

[Mick Bailey]

A glue line in a timber joint has only limited exposure to UV and ozone. Either can break down a finish in no time if its not formulated specifically to withstand them. Even so, high levels of UV will ultimately damage most things and glue spread over a surface has a much greater area of exposure than its original intended use. Indoors may not be so bad, though.