Gluing up purpleheart

[kyleheon]

So this past weekend we had a mishap with the washing machine and water leaked down into the basement and all over my table saw and, possibly worse, two unfinished cutting boards made of purpleheart and maple. They basically sucked up most of the water themselves (and what they didn't get the table saw top did) so they are unusable at this point (severe cupping and cracking).

What I'm not clear on is that most of the cracks are at the joints. I used Titebond II glue for this. I thought glue joints were supposed to be stronger then wood? I would have assumed the wood would break, not the joints. So are there any special requirements for gluing up purpleheart or did I just do something wrong?

In a few places there was some purpleheart cracking with a little crack here or there in the maple. I'm surprised by this as I thought purpleheart was really hard, is it not harder then rock maple?

You can see the damage here: http://yfrog.com/o0k29sgj

[theapprenticeshand]

Titebond II is not water resistant. That's why it failed.

For a cutting board, you should really used Titebond III. Any type of juices from your foods could cause glue failure of Titebond II.

[dwacker]

Titebond II is not water resistant. That's why it failed.

Not really. TB 2 is type two water resistant. TB 3 is type one and hold up to heat and saturation expansion better. Both are water resistant, both are tested to a 4 hour soak, but tb3 is tested at a boil.

Don

[bubba1772]

I actully have conducted a highly scientific experiment (ok mistake...) on this very subject ( maple, purple heart, glue, water etc ). You can read my post about it over at lumberjocks. http://lumberjocks.com/projects/63804 but the interesting thing I didn't mention on lumberjocks is that after finding my board in such a condition I took the advice of a couple of other jocks and dampened the board a bit and placed it in the oven on its lowest setting for about 40 minutes and to my amazement the board was actually almost perfectly flat! I did also notice though that there were a few cracks in some of the joint lines all going in the same direction and it came to mind that in the glue up of this board I had used titebond two for the first glue up stage and by the time I got around to doing the second glue up I had run out and bought a bottle of titebond three that I used for the second glueup. All of the cracks were running in the direction of the titebond two glue. I read the labels on the bottles and read how TB2 is "water resistant" while TB3 is "water proof". So it will be TB3 for my boards from now on!