 Consider using gravity as your friend when you're doing a large, complicated glue-up. Hello, woodworkers. Welcome back to Small Workshop, guys. Small Workshop. I often get my ideas for a new video from mistakes that I make in my workshop. That gives me an infinite supply of ideas for new videos. In this video, I'm doing a glue-up of my samurai carpenter workbench base. And it did not go as well as it was supposed to. There's a number of reasons for that. There's a few principles that you need to pay attention to. One of the first ones is if the drive bit doesn't go together really smoothly, then when you add glue to the arrangement, it's going to go even worse. So the first principle is to keep working on your drive bit until it goes really, really smoothly. That might entail doing more chiseling, more work with your block plane to get those tenons down a little bit. A second major principle would be to lock your workshop door so you don't have a neighbor walk in right when you're trying to figure out how things go together for a complicated fit. A third principle would be to use a slow-setting glue, such as Type-Bond 3, instead of regular Type-Bond or Type-Bond 2, or some other similarly slow-set-up glue. That way you have more time. A fourth principle that you might want to seriously consider is after all this time of getting something built and you're ready to do a glue-up, try to find a second pair of hands to come in and help you get leverage on things. My fifth principle, and this is an important one, is if it's not going well, make a decision quickly that it's not going well and bail out. In other words, pull it apart and wipe off that glue before it sets up too much. In the upcoming scene here, you will see me doing exactly that, pulling off some clamps real quick and then trying to pound that puppy apart. Fortunately, in this glue-up, I was able to use some wedges in the one end to pull everything tight so the fact that the glue had set up on one end while I was working on the other end was not all that devastating for me. However, in other circumstances, you could easily ruin an entire project by taking too long in your glue-up and then having some things set up on you before you pulled them tight. So I pulled everything apart. I wiped it down. I did some more dry fitting. I got things where they would fit smoother. And then I remembered that somebody had said, use gravity to your advantage. So my sixth principle is to, if you don't have that extra pair of hands, then try to figure out a way that you can let mother nature or gravity and the weight of the workpiece work to your advantage. So you can see me doing that here with the workbench set up on the end and then with this heavy piece being pushed down, where I've got the ability to push against it and use gravity and get it put together. Otherwise, I don't have the leverage that I need. The major lesson to be learned from this almost disastrous glue-up is that you should work and work on your dry fit until it goes really, really smoothly, including maybe a few rehearsals of doing your dry fit with all of the clamps that you need and everything that you need to get it glued up. Otherwise, disaster, good loom. Good luck in your woodworking. Small workshop guy, signing off. I would appreciate a subscribe and a like and share some comments. Thanks.