Thread: Laminating Legs

I will have a stab at answering.
1 they will be easier to keep strait if just slightly longer than the intended leg. If you however have something long strait and fairly solid to clamp to then longer will be ok.
2 You can batch a pile at least 135mm ( I assume the boards are 135 wide)perhaps a tad more. Just be aware that with wet glue they tend to want to slide around as you tighten the clamps.
3 Kind of answered in 1. Have a play around with a dry run clamp before the real thing so you get an idea of what is realistic. Nothing worse than running around looking for another clamp or packing as the glue is going off.
Regards
John

At only 50mm thickness I assume you're laminating 3 @ 50x45 to get the width?

If so, how you do it really depends on what size of clamps you have at hand and how many of them. Orraloon's above advice is sound.

Personally, I'd cut to a bit over leg length and use 3 or 4 sash clamps (alternating on top and on bottom) to glue up all the legs in one hit. Over that short a clamping span - only about 600mm total - if the boards start to "lift" or "bow" then the clamps are probably over-tight. Not a good idea.

Mind you, you can also use pairs of cauls between each sash clamp, held together by a g- or f- clamp on each end. I use this method when gluing up laminates around 900mm or wider to prevent such lifting and keep everything flat. (eg. table tops)

If you have access to a thicky & jointer, I'd suggest laminating to oversize and remilling to final size after glue-up. That way you could ignore minor glue creep and asstd. misalignments that the overnight gremlins like to visit upon us despite our OCDedness at clamping time.

Unless you're darksiding them?

Possibly a silly question, but is there any particular reason why you're laminating instead of just buying and dressing 150*50 timber?

If you go 50mm longer than finished length, you can drop some staples in the ends to help prevent slipping

If you are gluing up multiple legs in the one set of clamps, you have to make sure that both the glue face and the opposite face of the boards are straight (or can be pulled into straight via the clamp pressure). You can't have the unglued side of the board littered with hills and valleys, because as you stack more and more legs into the clamps, they will only receive clamp pressure from the contact points of the 'hills' and nothing from the voids created by the 'valleys'. Sending the boards through a thicknesser after jointing is the easy way to make sure the unglued face is good enough. There are limits as to how many you can stack into the clamps, but if you stick to stacking 4 legs, you will be OK with hobbyist type clamps. Even with decent taylor clamps I only ever laminated 8@90x90 staircase newel posts before moving to the next rack.

basically what orralloon and skew said

I'd glue the blanks up at around 100 mm over length

I'd try a dry run doing all 4 legs in one set of clamps, but if not happy with how that would go, I'd drop down to doing them in pairs or even one at a time.

Attempting to glue up a blank long enough for 2 or 3 or even 4 legs, is, IMO, asking for trouble.
And when it comes to trimming the laminated blanks to size, it will be easier working with each leg individually.

Watch the grain direction and orientation in the laminates so that when finished they look OK.

Thanks guys, I will take the advice and provide an update once I give it a go in the next few days.