More of those lab benches.

We were talking about chemistry lab bench tops the other day. At the weekend I cut up a couple of them, one 1.8m and this one, 2.6m long, both 600mm wide. These came from the long since demolished labs at my former place of work. Cut carefully to avoid the tongue and groove joints every ~150mm. The bit pictured is the spare. The rest is going to be a gate for a side passage, and should go nicely with the iroko front door which I made some years ago. I presume it is iroko, but the second (larger) board was much waxier to the touch than the first, though in colour and grain they look pretty similar. I could hardly lift the bigger piece ! I was younger and stronger when I acquired it.

This cutting up saw done outdoors as I only have the choice of a 28" 4 tpi rip handsaw, or a hand held circular saw, with no dust extraction. I did the initial cut by hand which established a straight edge to reference off; the back of the boards had been trimmed to follow a wall (seemingly by axe !) and the front edges were not too straight either. I was surprised how short work the hand saw made of this, which bodes well since some of the bits need to be ripped down the hard way still. A lot of hand planing to do if it is ever cool enough too.

Oh - my main purpose in posting this, aside from proving I still do some actual woodwork, was to ask for opinions on gluing up waxy stuff like this, for outdoor use - glue choice, preparation ?

I always clean areas to be glued with acetone.
I generally use a D4 poly expanding glue on Iroko

Many years ago one of my clients called me to look at her Iroko windows that would not close, basically all 4 glue joints had failed, apparently these windows had not been fitted long so my guess the manufacturer didn’t clean prior to glue up.

That's a good straight edge. I have high expectations for the gate

Seems quite a few of us have been able to snaffle some of these bench tops, but there must have been terrible wastage at the time.

Has cascamite gone back to its old formula, I quite liked that stuff

wallace said:

Has cascamite gone back to its old formula, I quite liked that stuff

Click to expand...

According to posts in this thread, yes, with the brand now belonging to a different company from the one whose ingredient supply was interrupted by geopolitical problems.