This is how to remove wood glue in four easy ways. In this post, I’ll show you four ways to remove wood glue from your projects, if you find yourself needing to clean up the excess after gluing.
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(Updaed July 2023)
How to Remove Wood Glue
Sometimes, despite your best efforts, accidentally have some dried wood glue on your boards or projects after you glue something together. This happens to everyone, and you need a couple of good methods to make that excess wood glue go away.
I’m going to show you four really good methods for how to remove wood glue coming up, and each one of them deals with the problem with a different level of aggression. For example, if you have a lot of wood glue to remove, sandpaper just isn’t going to cut it, so you’ll need a better way.
The nice thing about having four different ways to remove dried wood glue is that you can pick the one that makes the most sense for your project, and it will be quick and easy.
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Remove Wood Gluw with a Planer or Jointer
This first method is the most aggressive of them all, and it’s reserved for those times when you glue something together and really make a mess of it, but the boards are still flat. In times like this, you may just be able to use your jointer or planer.
Especially if you are gluing several pieces of wood together, a few passes through the planer can quickly take off the excess wood. Likewise, if you get too much glue on the edge of a board, you can take a few passes along the jointer.
These power tools are very aggressive, and they will remove the excess glue very quickly. You’ll just have to pay attention to make sure you don’t take of too much wood in the process.
Remove Wood Glue with a Hand Chisel
This next method is for when you have a lot of glue to remove , especially drips, but the shape of the material won’t pass through a planer or jointer safely. In situations like this, you still need an aggressive method , but unfortunately you won’t be able to use a power tool.
The hand chisel is one of the best tools for removing glue, and if you work slowly and carefully, you’ll do very minimal damage to the surrounding area. That’s a big point to remember, you don’t want to go nuts with the chisel and then they have a bunch of dings to repair. This is a tutorial on how to remove wood glue, not wood, so don’t dig too deep.
Instead, work carefully and methodically, and just remove the excess glue from the surface . It’s super important to have a very sharp chisel for this process, and every minute you spend sharpening will save you several when you go to use it. Learn to sharpen your chisel here.
Remove Wood Glue with a Cabinet Scraper
The next method for getting dried glue off your project is the cabinet scraper, and this is one of my personal favorites. The great thing about a cabinet scraper is that it works basically like a mini hand plane.
You’ll need to burnish a nice edge on your card scraper, but then you can go right after the dried glue and it will come up easily. The surface you leave behind will also be very smooth, which is a happy byproduct of using a cabinet scraper.
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This tool is best used at times when sandpaper is going to not quite cut it, and you need something that’s slightly more aggressive, but not as intense as a chisel. For times like this, the cabinet scraper can be your best friend .
You might even end up liking it so much that you start using it instead of sandpaper, which is the way that it was done for hundreds and hundreds of years before sandpaper was invented.
All those old woodworking projects and instruments made a long time ago never saw a single piece of sandpaper, yet they are wonderfully smooth. Check out these cabinet scraper tips if you are new to the tool.
Remove Wood Glue with Sandpaper
Next comes the least aggressive method of how to remove wood glue that has dried on to one of your projects by mistake. If you only have a very thin layer of glue, or a couple little drips, sandpaper is where you should start. This is going to be the least aggressive method, but if that’s all you need, then you shouldn’t go any farther.
Select some sandpaper that will not damage the surrounding surface very much, for example, don’t use 80 grit when you’ve already sanded the surface down to 220. Start as close to the surrounding surface grid as you possibly can for the best results.
Also, you should wrap your sandpaper around a flat block so you don’t accidentally sand a depression into the surface of your project with your fingers. It’s easy to focus too hard on one section of the project to remove the glue, and accidentally leave a divot. If you want, you can make my Heirloom Sanding Block and treat yourself to a really fancy one.
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Preventing Dried Glue Residue
Finally, when it comes to how to remove wood glue, the best thing you can do if you want to not have to deal with this problem at all is to take care of the issue before it becomes a chore. That means after every glue up, look around your piece for areas where you can remove the wood glue while it’s wet.
Wet wood glue is easier to remove than dry glue, and that reduces the amount of effort it takes. Wet glue can be removed with a wet rag, a straw, a piece of flexible plastic, any with just about any flexible item that can squeegee it off. In this way, you get rid of the glue before it can dry, which makes it much harder to address.
Also, sometimes your glue residue is hard to see until you apply a finish to the project. When that happens, you have to sand through the new finish in order to remove the glue, and that’s a real pain, especially so close to the end of a project. Instead, wipe off as much glue as you can with a wet rag, and you will have much less to deal with later.
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