Gluing paper to unbacked veneer

[Avinash Arora]

Hi Sawmill Creek! I'm new here. I've read numerous threads randomly over the last little while, and finally decided to make a thread to pose a question, however I ended up discovering an answer on my own. I thought I'd share it anyway because I had great difficulty finding anything in all of my google searching.

My fiancee and I are making save-the-dates for our wedding, and I had the idea of buying veneer, cutting them into postcard sizes and gluing them to paper cardstock. It's coming out pretty well so far, will end up costing roughly 53 cents per card, not including postage, and will be made of real hardwood, some exotic even.

Anywhosits, my original question was what adhesive to use for gluing paper to veneer, and I did all sorts of searching, aside from having a professional heat bond the paper (which is still probably the best option) there wasn't much information out there.

I tried a few different kinds of PVA glue, and they were okay, I thought about contact cement, but with the edges exposed I wanted something that's a little less susceptible to splitting. Several adhesives later, we eventually found that Super 77 worked the best. The difficulty with flexible glues was the difference in movement from the paper to the wood, most of the PVA glues resulted in curling of some kind of another. Super glue worked really well, but was pretty expensive for 100 postcards at like 2-3 cards per ounce of CA glue.

The spray adhesive seemed to not curl things at all, but since the wood wasn't perfectly flat, this was the method I worked out for me:

Paper and wood face down, spray both backs, and flip the paper onto the wood, press, slide around (you have about 15 seconds of working time) until it's aligned as good as you can get it, then put them aside. After they sit like this for 30 minutes, stack them all up and press them together to flatten and really bond them, but separate them again right away and put on a drying rack fora day or so, then trim any flashing or excess.

Thanks for being an awesome community! I hope that if someone decides to google this topic later on they find this thread and I can save them some headache and effort! Super 77 worked excellently!

After I'm done with the screen printing on the wood, I'll share the photos for the "build log"

[Wade Lippman]

Don't know anything about glue, but have you thought about gluing up larger sheets and then cutting them? That would have to be easier.

[larry senen]

interesting,when i use burl in marquetry,i normally use veneer tape to cover the entire sheet before cutting.i might try super 77.

[Avinash Arora]

Don't know anything about glue, but have you thought about gluing up larger sheets and then cutting them? That would have to be easier.

That definitely would have been better! The difficulty comes in here: I want to print on the paper (Addresses and a small message), and then I want to screen print on the wood.

Also, I bought this variety veneer pack, and all of the veneer pieces were about 12" long, by 5.5-7.5" wide, and getting 4x6 postcards (or 4x5.5 for the smaller pieces of veneer) meant I could basically only get two postcards per sheet of paper, there was a large amount of waste paper and veneer produced by this project, which I'm not super happy about, but it is what it is.

The mismatched sizing and stuff is what really made this a bit more of a challenge than it probably should have been. If someone were creating bulk cards and/or hand-writing all the backs, I'd say a roll of paper or something and a roll of veneer would definitely be a lot easier, and then cutting them to size after bonding.

interesting,when i use burl in marquetry,i normally use veneer tape to cover the entire sheet before cutting.i might try super 77.

So, I'll also say this: My intent was for the paper and veneer to be standalone items, for actual veneering onto an object of some kind, I still hold that PVA glue would probably have been better, as the curling isn't a huge issue when you're going to contact cement, heat tape, or heat press veneer onto a surface afterward. Super 77 doesn't get tacky that quickly, so while when it does bond, it works well, it might be too annoying to use. It's a lot faster than contact cement, but really similar in application which makes it both better in some ways and a lot worse in others.

[Avinash Arora]

So, I completely forgot to update this thread.....but we did it, and it was a mostly successful project! We did use Super 77 on the back of the paper and the veneer, and put a CA glue "rim" around the edges. The super 77 by itself adhered just fine, but its soft nature and the paper/wood difference meant curling happened, pretty fast, and very pronounced. The superglue was stiff enough to resist it so that mailing was still viable, although not perfect it did work. Doing it again, I'd say don't do it....or do what we did because I don't know how I'd do it better the next time.

Anywho, here's how it went:
Veneers, rough cut:


Screen printed setup for the veneers:


Veneers printed:


Printed cards laminated to the veneers with the super77 + CA glue method mentioned above:


After final trimming:


All in all, we're very happy with how they turned out!

[Mike Henderson]

Thanks for the update. I assume you're married by now so congratulations on your nuptials.

Mike

[Avinash Arora]

not just married, but celebrated our one year anniversary last month....I'm really bad about following up on forum threads

Thanks!!

[Jim Tobias]

Cool idea and execution! They turned out nice. Also, Congratulations!

Jim