I live in a remote part of the world and ordered this butcher block countertop. It split in transit but no one cares and you can't return anything. How can I fix this best? Dowels? Just glue? No we don't have a hardware and it would take a month to buy any special tool etc. Thanks
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AttemptingRepair
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Since you mention this is a countertop, there's a good chance it will see a lot of use and also a good chance that the underside will be hidden. Gluing and clamping definitely makes sense, but you could strengthen it further with whatever materials you have on hand. A few scraps of wood screwed across the crack on the underside would help. Almost any wood/screws will do, just make sure the screws don't penetrate the surface. I've seen this done on commercial countertops to keep adjacent sections level/solid. – Tim M. Dec 07 '22 at 19:15
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It appears that the split is not complete, that is, the wood is still secured at one end. This bodes well for a repair. To keep this aspect of the repair excludes any pins or dowels.
The trickiest part is to ensure that you have injected a good grade of glue as deeply into the crack as possible. Many wood glues are water soluble, but you don't want to thin it too much. Force as much into the tight end of the crack, perhaps wiggling one side up and down relative to the other, to assist in the travel of the glue.
Fill the open end of the crack in a similar manner, of course.
You'll want a flat surface, one as flat as possible, protected from glue squeeze-out for obvious reasons. A waxed paper or plastic sheet will suffice, as the glue will be easily removed from these materials.
After the glue is applied, place the block on the surface, protected top and bottom. Load as much weight as practical evenly on the surface of the block. Additionally, force should be applied laterally to squeeze the crack together. If you lack clamps, consider that ropes wrapped around the block can be twisted to create a clamping force.
It will be a challenging balance between the force applied ninety degrees to the crack and the force trying to lift the center of the board away from the surface. The weight should be distributed closely to the crack, but not concentrated in such a manner as to damage the wood.
Another method of squeezing the crack closed is to engage it with wedges applying force from the sides. This will still require pressure from the top and bottom to prevent a "spring-out" in which the crack splits free and the panels jump into the air! The wedge method requires that the flat surface on which the board is placed be able to accept fixed rails which provide force transfer by wedges to the board.
While searching for a photo to better illustrate the wedge method I've described, I found an even better solution at the lumberjocks web site:
This is far simpler and requires only rope and boards, which should be strong enough to manage the forces and require that the boards be square and true to create a suitably flat result.
fred_dot_u
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3Wow.. thank you ENORMOUSLY for this.. love that photo of the wedges. Again, THANK YOU... – AttemptingRepair Dec 06 '22 at 22:45
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1I'm glad you found my answer of value. It is customary on SE to tick the upvote and also to wait a suitable period to allow others to create possibly more suitable answers. If this answer is the one you select, there is an acceptance icon as well. – fred_dot_u Dec 06 '22 at 22:48
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In between big clamps and ropes are ratchet straps used for securing loads. and if you can get your hands on a syringe with a really fat hypodermic needle, or a really thin syringe with no needle, that can be used to get the glue deeper into the crack – Chris H Dec 07 '22 at 16:02
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2I have used thin hollow plastic coffee stir sticks and my breath to blow glue deeper into a narrow crack I was repairing. It seemed to work better than my previous technique of using a thin piece of wood like a toothpick because the pick would pull back almost as much glue as you pushed in. – Michael Hall Dec 08 '22 at 00:45
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Along with fred_dot_u's good answer, if you don't think that's a strong enough repair, you can do a bowtie/butterfly in a couple places to add strength to the repair. This would be done after the glue sets/cures on the crack repair, as you don't want to shift anything while making these cuts and setting the bowtie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_joint
I haven't done one myself, so I won't try to explain it (and there are plenty of good walkthroughs and videos to search for), but I do know that some bowties are fairly shallow for only surface cracks. With this being a full thickness crack, you would likely want to do a full thickness bowtie.
computercarguy
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But it will be a strong enough repair if done right. Glued joints are stronger than the wood around them — you see how some of the crack completely ignores the glue line right beside it and instead the wood itself broke? – Graphus Dec 09 '22 at 14:11
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@Graphus, it's true that some wood glue is stronger than wood, but if the wood was cracked under shipping conditions, there might be something structurally wrong with the wood. I just worked with some plywood that delaminated on the glue seam just by using a circular saw on it. And when I went to fix it, a large section just peeled off when I tried to lift the edge to squeeze glue under. fred_dot_u was concerned that the wood glue wouldn't penetrate the crack well, so there's the possibility of uneven coverage. – computercarguy Dec 09 '22 at 16:38
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ALL the commonest wood glues produce long-grain joints stronger than the wood, even the 'weakest' of them (something that makes all the published glue-strength comparisons basically useless, as I've pointed out here previously). The caveat being this assumes the joint is done correctly. The plywood example is not a good data point for this, because of the way that plywood is made (no individual care and attention being the main issue). Many cheaper plywoods can occasionally have weak joints somewhere in the plies unfortunately, although it's generally not quite as bad as you experienced. – Graphus Dec 10 '22 at 09:06