Originally Posted by
AnkleWork
Glueing practice is well studied and the strongest glued joints have the thinnest layer of glue.
As thin as practical, but not too thin would seem to be the proviso. What you say is true, provided you don't clamp the thing so hard you end up with no glue in the joint. For a wood glue example, see
here. For an epoxy specific guitar-relevant discussion, see
here.
The problem can be exacerbated if the two surfaces are hard and are very conformal. Then hard clamping gives you direct substrate-to-subtrate contact, with NO glue! Have a glue layer that's too thick for the bike example is a bit moot anyway, as you are epoxying to epoxy. The whole bike is an epoxy layer!
In any case, I trust Andrew - he seems like he pays attention to stuff. Light/moderate positional clamping following by heavier setting clamping makes sense to me, and he's had success with it.