Glued Linen Armour- a simple test

[rocktupac]

I'm quite surprised Scott- I just don't see how thoroughly saturated protein glue could not be a gel and no longer a functional adhesive- the two are mutually exclusive. Collagen will absorb a huge amount of water, and becomes basically 'Jell-O'- it's how I clean my glue pot: add the same amount of additional water as leftover glue present and it's a rubbery mass in a relatively short time. If your experience was that the glue was still quite functional, it either couldn't have been saturated or something else is going on. With PVA I can understand, but not rabbit glue unless it's very different than bovine hide glue. Now I really want to try this all again to see if I missed something significant...

I can understand your shock and any degree of skepticism you may have. I expected the layers to be peeling off one another but this simply didn't happen (after rereading the section in our article about waterproofing I found that we simulated the rain test for 12 hours and not the 10 I mentioned earlier). To go even further (and I didn't mention this earlier), we fully submerged the patches in buckets of water for three hours. All of the patches held their shape and only the untreated PVA patch and the lanolin-coated patch had the outer layer partially detached. Most interesting was how the various test patches dried. The untreated PVA and rabbit glue patches were completely dry after only 8 hours and, remarkably, recovered nearly all of their former integrity. The patch made of PVA glue, lost about half its outer layer, but once dry, the other 17 layers were still tightly bonded and showed few signs of their immersion. The loose flaps of the outer layer could be repaired very quickly with a few dabs of glue. The untreated patch made with rabbit glue survived even better. It too dried quickly and, once dry, it resumed its original rigidity and shape without even any edges having come loose.

I'm sorry to admit but I have no experience with bovine glue. Best of luck if you decide to replicate the tests with rabbit glue yourself. Let me know if I can help you out in any way.