3-Way Panel Clamp System

[Music] hey everybody welcome back to the shop today I wanted to tackle the issue of gluing up panels and some of the difficulties that we find when we're doing that I've got just a sample here the parts aren't actually glued or anything but this is kind of just an example of some of the things that go into gluing up a panel first of all and you put the glue on the edges of your boards and you lay them in your clamps that you have already and set to go and and then you tighten the clamps down onto the boards and you want to make sure you put some other clamps on the top to even out the clamping pressure and then maybe to help yourself keep the whole panel flat you might add some calls with some clamps on those calls to kind of hold everything flat and you know this is an effective way and it's a kind of a tried-and-true method of clamping up your panels but one thing that I noticed is that first of all it uses a lot of different components and there's a lot of steps which can take up time and all that time that you are fiddling with clamps and calls and things your glue is setting up and then another issue is just how crowded the space becomes with so many different clamps and calls and things and them they start to get in the way of each other and so anyway I thought maybe there would be a better way and those of you that follow my channel know that I have replaced using wood calls with using yoona struttin and for quite some time I've been thinking of a way to integrate all of these actions with one single clamp and so I think I've come up with that there are commercial solutions out there that do just that but of course they cost a lot of money mine is a kind of a cost effective way to do it and you can do it with tools that you have in your own shop so this is what I came up with mm so I guess you could kind of call it like a three-way clamp or something I just call it a panel clamping system so as you can see the the calls are integrated and then you use these two this bolt and this nut to apply call pressure to flatten the board and the key is of this whole system is in this cross threaded bolt right here and then so we can use this bolt to apply edge pressure onto the panel to make everything tight so basically this one clamp takes the place of this guy here and this guy here in this guy here so first I'm going to show you how I built it and then I will do a demonstration at the end of the video so I start out with this piece of yoona strut that I just picked up my local Home Depot you can probably get them for a better price if you buy them from an electrical supply house but this was what I had available to me and so this is what I got the unit comes in ten foot sections and here you see me cutting them down to a workable size which in this case is 20 inches of peace I chose 20 inches because I wasn't sure how well this was going to work and so I did not want to waste a whole lot of material making a bunch of larger clamps but also these clamps will specialize in narrower panels that I need to glue up generally something about 16 inches and shorter than that most of the hardware I'll be using for this project is 1/2 inch bolts and nuts but I do have one 3/4 inch bolt that I will be using and that's that special bolt that will have the perpendicular hole drilled and tapped but more on that later right now I'm using a step bit to expand one of the holes on the inner strut to accept that 3/4 inch point back to that three quarter inch bolt now the whole principle of operation of this 3-way clamp revolves around the manufacturer of this bolt now I just take a standard 3/4 inch a grade two bolt and what I'm doing is first I'm finding Center roughly finding it just using the tip of my drill bit and I'm drilling a pilot hole I follow up that pilot hole with the twenty seven sixty fourths hole that is needed to tap a half-inch thread now comes time to tap that half inch hole I start by filing the opening just to make a smooth transition and hopefully to help the tap ease its way in a little bit easier and then as I'm starting the threads on the tap it becomes apparent that my tap handle is a little too small for the job and so I ended up having to make some cheater bars for my tap handle just to give me the extra leverage that I need I definitely need to get myself a better tap handle this one barely made it through this project and I don't see it lasting much longer beyond that now it's time to prepare to do some welding now I can see the comments now with all the warnings about welding on unis strut and other galvanized hardware and zinc poisoning is a very real thing and it's serious and so before you do anything you need to take some precautions if you can't prepare the metal to remove the zinc coating there are some things that you can do first off obviously you're going to be wearing your welding helmet but under your helmet you can wear a respirator to help filter out some of those fumes also another thing you can do which helps greatly is to increase the air circulation in your shop venting the air to the outside which I am doing here with the squirrel cage fan if you use some of these precautions it'll greatly reduce your chances of getting sick from the zinc fumes when you start welding on zinc plated or galvanized hardware okay now that that's out of the way I begin welding on the unit strut by adding washers to all the holes that I'm going to use and the reason I use washers is just to spread out the load a little bit since these half-inch nuts don't have a lot of surface area they're gonna want to tend to bend or or kink the webbing of the unit strut and so the washers help spread out the load a little bit after the washers are attached then I attach the nuts to the washers and I'm using nothing but tack welds here because all I want to do is hold this stuff in place it doesn't have to carry the load the welds don't carry the load at all all the welds do are holding the washers and the nuts in place so I don't have to use two wrenches when I am tightening these bolts down when I'm using these clamps and you will see how that works in the near future I need to come up with a good name for this bolt I can't call it a cross threaded bolt because that would mean that there's some damage to the threads but anyhow now is the time that I attached the bolt to the same apparatus that I attached the nuts and the washers and this bolt is also going to be tack welded in just like the nuts and the washers and I oriented to make sure that the cross bolt that goes through it is parallel to the unit strut and it will become quite apparent soon why I need that to be parallel time to clean up these welds and make everything look nice and pretty because as of right now one clamp is completely finished and now I'm going to demonstrate to you exactly how these clamps water okay so I start out like this since these are these this panel is only gonna be four feet long so it's convenient that my out foot outfeed table is about four feet as well and I start by laying out my clamping system this is the side that has all the welding done to it so it's going to lay down here I'm gonna take my boards and I lay them out the way I want them before I get too far I do want to protect the edge of my board from these bolts that are sticking out so I'm going to put a sacrificial strip right here you know I'll put one on the other side as well once I get to that point we're gonna go ahead and apply glue to my joints so I haven't tested this out yet this is the first time so it's going to either succeed or fail and it's being captured on video there's a pretty significant cup in this board so this system will I mean this test will let me know whether or not the system actually works so now I grab my top pieces don't forget my other sacrificial strip here all right so now that I've got most of these snap it down I don't want to clamp them down too hard yet this one's a little tight these guys and put them on all right now I'm going to drive these screws in to clamp the edges all right and I'm doing a little by little here so now I'm going to clamp down this a little bit more all done now it's ready to sit for a good hour before I take these off and at that point I'll see how we're doing a good squeeze out on that side but not so much in this what this side I don't know if I put enough glue in there I'm probably gonna have to use hard wood for the scrap pieces because the screws just drove directly into that pine but you can see how they are working here those push against that edge and then these vertical bolts are what stops it on the backside I'm gonna have to put some washers on here too so it doesn't warp that units truck too bad with repeated use I I do have a couple washers that seems to work a lot better all right it's been over an hour so I'm gonna go ahead and loosen up these clamps and we'll take a look at this board see how flat we got it now sorry everybody my battery died while I was taking that apart but I think he got the gist of how easy it was to get it apart I'm gonna take you in now close and we're gonna take a look and see how it did it did come out pretty flat there's just maybe just a hair of an overhang I mean this is like less than 64 it's just perceptible by touch this one is that's a line maybe just a little bit but again that's really gonna come out with just some light sanding the big issue I think and something I'm gonna have to stay cognizant of when I'm using these clamps and I am just ever so slightly denting the wood these lines are just lines left because the you know struts of dirty but here's a good one here where I had this back bolt tightened down a little too far so when I tighten down this front bolt it dug the unit's turret into the woods so that's gonna take nice amount of sanding to get out luckily with this piece I actually only need about 14 inches and so I'm gonna actually I got lucky because I'm gonna be able to cut that off but for the most part it looks pretty good I might coat the rails of this unit start with something just so I don't get this but it's all gonna stand out anyway so I don't think it'll matter all right for those of you that won't be convinced until you see something straight on here meanwhile here's straight edge you can kind of see the light coming through if I lift it up and that's about as flat as you can get so for those small ridges like I said oh they'll probably stand out if not I got my my plane right here to play them down but that's pretty darn good so yeah we got some more stock I've got another tabletop to build it's the reason why I built these well I hope you enjoyed this video I put a lot of work into this you know I really wanted this video to be a little bit special and kind of inspire you guys so if you make this or even if your plan on making it go ahead and drop a note down in the comments and let me know I'd be interested to see here how many of you would actually be interested in building something like this and let me know if you think it's worth it I it was really a lot of fun to build I don't get to weld that often and you know as you can see I'm not very good at it but all the same it was a fun project and I have more projects to come this particular project that I'm building these tables for I've got another jig I got a build so I'll have another video up for that so I hope you guys stick around and watch the rest of my videos let's go ahead and subscribe if you like this type of content thanks for watching and I'll see you guys next time you

Channel: Thomas Lightle

Views: 261,307

Keywords: Wood, Woodworking, woodshop, shop, tips, DIY, hacks, rustic, pallet, panel, clamp, 3-way, system, caul, board, flat, unistrut, strut, thread, tap, bolt, nut, washer, welding, weld, welder

Id: 65jYLBK6hwQ

Length: 19min 2sec (1142 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 14 2018