Steve Elliott
>I've been doing veneer work at my current job for almost two years now, mostly hot press veneering using urea formaldehyde glue. I'm also learning vacuum bag veneering, which we reserve for curved parts.

The trickiest thing to learn has been getting good adhesion without having too much glue ooze through the pores. It takes the right consistency of glue, quick and even application, and sometimes a few minutes of waiting before the piece goes into the press.

For vacuum bag work we use PVA glues, Titebond Extend for larger or more complicated pieces because of its increased open time and Titebond I for smaller pieces. If there are bubbles they can be fixed by injecting glue and ironing down the veneer.

I can't speak to the use of hide glue because in 30 years of work in cabinet and furniture shops I've never used it, nor do I remember a shop that had any on hand. I imagine that furniture repair shops might be more likely to use it.

That said, I hope to try hide glue when I retire and finally have more time to learn the skills discussed on this forum, such as hand cutting dovetails. The level of craft displayed in most of the projects posted here vastly exceeds what I do at work every day in terms of using wood well with respect to its nature. Traditional joinery and design developed to allow furniture to last through many changes of humidity and temperature, to be strong yet light, and to be repairable. I'm now making pieces that sell for jaw-dropping prices in nationally known galleries, but they're pretty much just shapes drawn with some designer's CAD program and wallpapered with veneer. The exact shade of the wood and metal finishes has to meet the designer's approval and the workmanship has to be good cosmetically, but underneath it's pretty basic. I regularly make tables that have such heavy metal bases that I'm not sure the screws holding the tabletop to the base will hold if the table is ever picked up by its top to move it. Not that you'd want to, because moving them is best done with a forklift.

As for being product-oriented, professional shops are that way by nature. Skill acquisition comes mostly by hard knocks, making lots of mistakes in the early years and gradually developing some technical expertise and coping skills. I believe the better shops are ones that develop their processes and invest some time in training their workers. It's pretty rare.

My own hobby time is spent mostly on tools. What I’m after is the enjoyment of understanding and tinkering with them, and after I’m gone I hope some future owner will appreciate how well the tool works. I consider tools that end up in collections to have died, or at least their working lives have ended. I’d rather see them used until they’re worn out. I just love it that my best tools are older than my parents and yet are still in their prime.