I suspect it will not be nearly as strong as hide glue. The primary protein in blood is albumin. The primary protein in hide is collagen.
Collagen is fibrillar (fibrous like a rope) and albumin is globular (...like a glob, lol). Collagen is a structural protein in tissues, and albumin is not. Without brushing up on my cell biology, I suspect albumin mainly works to maintain blood viscosity.
Collagen, when put in suspension and then dried (I.e. Made into hide glue and used) will get entangled with itself, and that's what makes it strong. Without the fibrillar structure of the collagen, that would not take place nearly as much,
Just thought I'd bump this thread to confirm that it didn't work. It actually did set and it bonded two pieces of wood together, but I could pull them apart fairly easily. Admittedly I only let the glue set for about 10 hours. I was surprised that it did make a bond though.
The reason i wanted to do this was because the Eskimo are said to have done it to make tent poles:
https://books.google.com/books?id=sZ4QAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA19Perhaps seal blood and cow blood (which was used for plywood, as many people pointed out) is simply stronger than human blood, with more/better albumin. There is a guy named Elfshot who tried making some to glue drill bits with, he apparently did not have a lot of success (the bonds broke ultimately) although he did say seal blood was very sticky.
I should point out that I did not dry my blood outdoors but let it congeal over several days, because I can't leave a glass full of blood outdoors without having the cops called on me. It is possible that the proteins degraded because of this. The Eskimo may have been able to freeze-dry their seal blood more rapidly, which may make it more effective, but I don't know about that.
All in all I would be willing to try it again using my own blood if I could just dry the blood more quickly, perhaps use more, and let it dry longer. It also seems there is a trick to getting it in the right state to be glued. When you mix the dried blood with saliva it eventually becomes a very shiny material like hide glue, and when you press it with force and take force off you can see it binding. It definitely has some strength to it but I think it's one of those things, like making pine pitch, where you have to get everything to a right consistency that is difficult to understand without having seen it before. Unfortunately I must not have seen it, cuz I don't know it, so if it is possible to use human blood for bowyering it would take a lot of experimentation, for me. Raw animal blood I won't put in my mouth.
