Hey Guys!
It's Mike, from The Geek Pub!
And on this episode we're going to test what's stronger: Glue or Screws!
OK.
Well in order to determine whether wood glue or screws is stronger I have setup this come-along
between these three trees, and I have got this crane scale that goes up to a full ton.
That's 2000 lbs.
And I am going to put that in the loop so that we can measure how much weight gets applied
or how much force is required to pull these boards apart, and I've got a Go Pro on here
so that we can record that.
I have also put together several different pieces of wood.
Attaching some of them with wood glue, and some of them with screws.
But!
We're going to start with a control, and the control is nothing more than a 2x2.
And we're going to find out how much force it takes to break a wood, sorry, a solid piece
of wood, before we even attempt to break the ones that been glued or screwed together,
so that we have a baseline.
OK.
So I have setup this really long bar as a safety measure, and that will allow me to
stand clear of when the board breaks.
And all I have to do is start tightening it up.
We are at roughly 250 lbs.
Now we're at about 360 lbs.
Still don't hear any cracking.
Ooh!
And there we go!
OK!
So now we're going to test wood glue!
And this is just two 2x2s that are overlapped by one foot and glued together.
I let these dry for two weeks because I wanted to make sure this was a perfectly long-term
bond.
And so lets see what happens here.
OK!
We are at roughly 230 lbs.
Wow!
That uh, that broke way sooner than I expected.
So uh, because of that, I actually made two of the exact ones.
We're going to test glue again.
OK.
This is wood glue: test number two.
And uh.
I uh, hope this one takes a little more weight than the first one.
OK.
We are roughly at 256 lbs and I am already hearing some cracking.
That's not good.
346 lbs it looks like.
460 lbs this is much better than the first result.
That's why I always like to test things twice.
OK.
We're at 500 and uh.
Woops.
Hang on.
Nope.
We've went down some.
That means we're probably about to fail.
Yeah.
That's exactly what happened so.
There we go.
This sample is two wood screws.
And these wood screws are exactly the length of the board, so they go all the way through
both boards.
OK and we are roughly 182 lbs.
Starting to hear some cracks... and...
Check where we are.
We are roughly at 348 lbs. and it broke.
OK.
This is our last test.
This is four wood screws.
Same thing.
Two 2x2s overlapped by exactly twelve inches.
And I expect that we will have no better luck with this one.
And uh.
We're not even at 200 lbs yet.
Jumped the gun on that one.
Again, this long arm keeps me out of the firing line should something go wrong.
And we are now at 355 lbs.
I hear cracking.
And we are at uh, 520ish lbs.
And its about to give.
And there it goes.
OK.
I went in the house.
I wanted to take the GoPro footage out and I wanted to look at it frame by frame so I
could find the exact number where the wood started to fail, because the wood actually
took a higher strain and then broke, or it started cracking and losing some of its structural
integrity and then broke at a lower weight.
And so I wanted to find out what the absolute max that the board held before it started
to buckle.
And interestingly enough, so here it is.
The first one with glue was 534 lbs.
The second one with glue, and I think that one might have actually failed because of
some flaws in the wood, we'll look at that in just a second.
The second one with wood glue broke at 590 lbs.
Or lost structural integrity at 590 lbs.
Here's where it gets interesting.
Two wood screws broke at 442 lbs and four wood screws broke at 520 lbs.
Almost up to our glue standards.
At least for the first uhm, for the first board.
So lets take a look at a couple of things here.
Both of the test with screws broke along the lines of where the screws penetrated the wood.
And I think that's very telling, because if you look at the glue samples, the glue bond
is still one hundred percent intact.
The uhm, the wood actually broke somewhere other than where it was glued together.
Meaning that the glue joint is actually stronger than the wood itself.
That's interesting.
OK.
So how do we call this?
I think it's pretty easy actually, because the samples with glue held about 150 lbs more
weight before they started to fail than the ones with screws and that is about 33% stronger.
So in this particular case, glue wins.
Well hey guys!
Thank you so much for being a fan of my stuff!
If you think I did something wrong in this video or you'd like to see me test it in a
different way be sure to leave a comment below.
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all of my projects as I am building them, so you get a sneak peak as we go along.
See you in the next video!