Purchasing hide glue in Europe: not so easy

Instrument Building
21

Thanks a lot. This solves the mistery of why there are so few sellers of hide glue in Europe.
If one looks for “technical gelatine”, instead, he finds many resellers. It’s used in art (gilding, canvas, frescoes, tempera…), and even in photography as a reagent. Usually the products called “technical gelatine” have high Bloom strength not suitably for harpsichord making, for example 380, 500 and so on. But there are many, so I guess it should be easy to find something around 200 Bloom grams. I’ve found even a couple of technical gelatines of 120-140 Bloom, they are in pearls and seem bone glue.
However bone glue is plenty strong, so maybe I am splitting the hair.

Re: odor, I happen to actually like bone glue’s odor, but my wife and my two daughters vehemently disagree. I read a lot of people dislike that odor as well. However, hide glue has a much sweeter scent than bone.

22

Please look at this:

They use fish glue for gluing the soundboard in the case, just as David Pickett did with his harpsichord(s). They use bone glue (he says bone, not hide glue) for small pieces and says it’s because the glue gels when used on big surfaces such as a soundboard. This has been my own experience only when gluing the bridge, while the soundboard is very easy to glue with bone/hide glue because it’s very thin: just let the glue gel, put the soundboard in place inside the case and warm the soundboard edge, which will warm and remelt the glue, put a clamp or a go-bar or a nail; move 5-6 inch, warm, re-melt, clamp, move 5-6 inch, warm, re-melt, clamp, and so on.

Fish glue is evidently perfectly good, however. And you can mix all flavours of animal glue: bone, hide, fish, cow, horse, pig, sturgeon, 164-gram, 315-gram…

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