why wait to dry the glue?

[Egon]

Sometimes, when I'm playing, the rubber touches the table and it peels off a little from the edge of the blade. I don't want to completely re-glue the rubber, so I glue that area with water-based glue. Then, after a while, when I change the rubber, I notice a change in the color of the wood in that area. Not all types of wood change color; for example, eucalyptus and mahogany darken, while koto doesn't.

 

[Westy]

I usually seal all my blades with a thin layer, and sand it slightly with 400grid, so wet glueing shouldn’t be a problem. Sometimes I use to little glue and or force and after time the rubber became detached so I had to reglue. Sometimes I didn’t cover 100% of the blade with small cut rubbers, to avoid re-glueing I decided to use this wet glueing press.

 

[Zwill]

I tried wet glue with Sueke no2 and while it's a strong glue with this method the bond on my blade was extremely weak. Granted I didn't use these tools but I have home made "clicky" press, which actually used bolts and nuts to tighten, so not all that different to these tools.

I can imagine a Butterfly freechack pro glue to be better suited since that is very strong glue, stronger than Sueke no2.

 

[jonol]

Of course the bond is weak when you wet glue. Table tennis glue is a type of contact glue and is designed specifically to be used on two separate dry surfaces.

When the two surfaces with the dried glue come in contact, they chemically bond with the matching chemicals on the other surface.

Wet gluing with contact glue is ridiculous.

 

[Westy]

I just tested the 2 wet glued rubber which I used with a Ceracraft press on a sealed blade. Absolutely good bond.

 

[Dr Evil]

TT glue is mostly rubbery polymer particles suspended in water. It doesn’t cure by chemical reaction. Instead, as the water evaporates, the particles pack together, deform, and merge into a continuous adhesive film. The glue turning from white to clear means most of the water has evaporated and the film has formed.

Wet gluing traps moisture between the sponge and the wood, making drying slower and less uniform. Wet glue can also squeeze into ridges, pores, or uneven patches under pressure, creating an inconsistent glue line. Prolonged contact with trapped water can soften or swell the top ply, and can contribute to warping.

The dry-first method is a controlled contact-adhesive process. You form a thin, uniform, tacky film on both surfaces, then press the two dry films together. This creates a flatter, more predictable bond and usually makes removal cleaner, with less risk of tearing the sponge or pulling wood fibers.

Wet gluing can still work, especially with very thin coats, porous sponges, absorbent blades, and extended clamping time. But it’s less controlled. It risks trapped moisture, uneven thickness, over-saturation of the wood or sponge, and messier rubber removal.

 

[zeio]

And that film becomes elastic due to crosslinking during the drying process.

 

[Dr Evil]

And that film becomes elastic due to crosslinking during the drying process.

No. TT glue (usually a latex or polyurethane dispersion in water) doesn't become elastic mainly through chemical crosslinking during drying. Its film forms mostly by coalescence. As water evaporates, the suspended polymer particles are forced closer together. Capillary pressure packs them, deforms them, and helps them merge into a continuous rubbery film. Over time, polymer chains from neighboring particles can interdiffuse and entangle.

The elasticity comes mostly from the flexible polymer chains in the continuous film, not from new chemical crosslinks. Drying is mostly a physical process: water leaves, particles coalesce, and intermolecular forces plus chain entanglement hold the film together. The lack of permanent crosslinking helps explain why the dried glue layer remains soft, tacky, and peelable.

 

[zeio]

Finezip is an acrylic copolymer (from the MSDS provided by Nittaku) and an experiment showed that bounce increased after a few days.

 

[Dr Evil]

Finezip is an acrylic copolymer (from the MSDS provided by Nittaku) and an experiment showed that bounce increased after a few days.

Very interesting, but it's not because of chemical cross-linking. Water-based glues take a long time to fully release moisture once trapped beneath the rubber. It can easily take 72 hours for water molecules to diffuse through the solid latex layer and wood plies, which mirrors the rise in COR.