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A glue bottle turns out to be quite useful

September 28th, 2009 in blogs     
MKenney Matthew Kenney, associate editor
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Nifty tool for small spaces. This glue bottle makes it easy to get small beads of glue in just the right place.
Tight Squeeze. The mortise for the lid lift on this box is too small for a normal glue bottle, which would put down way too much glue.
A perfect bead of glue. The bottles needle nose put down just the right amount of glue, and the accordian-style body made it easy to start and stop right where I wanted.
Nifty tool for small spaces. This glue bottle makes it easy to get small beads of glue in just the right place.

Nifty tool for small spaces. This glue bottle makes it easy to get small beads of glue in just the right place.

Photo: Matt Kenney
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Recently I was building a cabinet and one of the joints did not close up completely, leaving the thinnest little crack visible. The joint had a good fit, I just didn't get clamping pressure where it needed to be. The solution, I knew, was to get some glue down in the that crack and reclamp the joint. So I scoured the local Woodcraft store and found a pair of little accordion-style bottles with long needle noses. At $4.50 for the pair, I figured it was a good risk. Well, they worked fine for the joint, even though I would have liked a needle nose with a much smaller opening. I was happy.

Then I started to make a box with three trays, and the glue bottle really showed its worth. All of those small parts needed glue, but a normal-size glue bottle put down too big a bead of glue. So  I tried the needle nose of my accordion bottle. It put down a perfectly sized bead of glue, and it's very easy to control when the flow starts and stops. I was able to get all of the trays, including the dividers, together without any squeeze-out. The needle nose was also perfect for applying glue when gluing the lid lift on.


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Comments (2)

Beckum writes: You can also get the same bottles from ebay for refilling ink cartridges. Just another place to find them and they do work very well. Easy to fill with glue, though some thinning might be required sometimes. Very easy to control. And I've never had a blow out with one of them either. Posted: 11:10 am on October 10th
TimR writes: Hey Matt… neat little accessory. I used a syringe a couple months ago to re-glue several chairs for my grandmother. I think this tool would have done a better job. Between the viscosity of the glue and the small orifice of the needle, the hydraulic pressure would blow apart the syringe and glue would go everywhere. It seems like this tool would be more “user-friendly”. Posted: 11:09 am on September 29th
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