Jason, we should have shown you our spare arm at Seattle, it had a clear coat finish. We used that version at St Louis, see
http://www.popularmechanics.com/tech...c=rss#fbIndex5
We used wood glue except when glueing to non-wood, for the same reasons you stated.
We took a major hit on the arm in St Louis, a rough estimate was a bot hitting our arm moved our bot ~12" sideways, a bit of glue and we were good to go for our next match.