# Help glueing up warped wood



## lnjustin (Aug 29, 2016)

I’ve reclaimed some cedar wood from my grandmother’s hope chest to build a jewelry box for my mom. I’ve prepared the dovetail joints and am ready for the glue up.







The challenge is that the wood, being that it is reclaimed from an old chest, is not perfectly flat. It’s slightly warped. I think it will pull in ok on the glue up. But I am scared that in doing so I might stress the wood too much and crack it. Are there any steps I can take to reduce the stress on the wood, make the wood more flexible, or otherwise reduce the chances of the wood cracking when clamped for the glue up? I’ve read about wetting or heating wood for bending but not sure if that applies in this context.


----------



## woodnthings (Jan 24, 2009)

You will find out when/if it cracks during the glue up. It may be just fine, but a lot depends on how much warp there is. No way to "condition" it that I know of. Wood is flexible to some extent, so just dry fit it first, if that's even feasable with those dovetails? Even if it does finall crack, you can always fill a small gap with glue or epoxy after the fact.


----------



## monkey paw (Apr 15, 2021)

I'm not to sure on steps you could take now that it is ready for glue up. I work with a lot of reclaimed wood. The first steps I always do is run the material through a jointer and thickness planer. Before I got those machines I would use my router table as a jointer hand planes.


----------



## difalkner (Nov 27, 2011)

Do a dry fit before you put glue on the joints. That will give you a better feel for how it's going to react.


----------



## Tool Agnostic (Aug 13, 2017)

difalkner said:


> Do a dry fit before you put glue on the joints. That will give you a better feel for how it's going to react.


That's good advice.

I was taught that you should do a dry fit every time before a glue-up. I always do it.


----------

