Assembly table - Best gluing jig ever!

hi you got something to clamp up that needs to be perfectly flat or perfectly square or it's odd shaped and hard to clamp or it's odd shaped and it has to be perfectly flat and square well i am about to make all of your clamping problems go away or at least i'm going to make them a whole lot simpler than they are right [Music] now throughout my woodworking career i have built thousands of jigs most of these just have a single use you use them once and then you throw them away but every now and then i have created a jig that has a thousand uses and this is one of them in my books i refer to this as a clamping jig or a clamping table or an assembly jig but for the purposes of this video we'll call this an assembly table i like it has a nice ring it's very simple extremely simple just a box it's got slots on the top and on the bottom and holes everywhere this allows you to take a clamp and put it wherever you need it you can put a clamp in the middle on the edges use clamps to draw things against the against the fences literally anywhere not only it is it uh useful it is extremely easy to build as i'm about to show you as you can see this is nothing more than a torsion box you have strips of wood that are glued together to form a box and as long as you make these cuts to make these strips perfectly straight then when you put the top and the bottom on the top and the bottom are going to be perfectly flat now as i said these parts are glued together these parts are screwed on and the reason is because the top and the bottom are made out of melamine and glue doesn't stick to melamine which is exactly what you want when you're making an assembly table now let me put it back together and i'll show you how it works okay all back together now i'm going to wax all the surfaces of this assembly table before i use it i know i told you this was melamine and glue does not stick to melamine well it won't stick a whole lot more if i first fall get it coated with some wax i'm going to also wax the fences the fences are wood and the glue will stick to those if i don't first coat them with wax i'm setting up for our first glue up i'm going to glue up a cabinet door and i need both fences so that i can get it perfectly square this assembly table is designed so that you can set it up with both fences one fence along the long side one fence along the short side or no fences whatsoever the fences just bolt in place and the holes in which they are mounted are drilled a little bit bigger than the bolts themselves that allows you to adjust the fence back and forth just a few degrees and make the fences absolutely positively square to one another okay the fences are tightened down and we're reasonably sure they're perfectly square to one another so let's uh set up this cabinet door and do a dry clamp before we actually commit ourselves to gluing it together that looks pretty good now i'm going to use some calls to keep the clamps from denting the wood and like everything else here these calls have been waxed so they will not stick to the assembly once it's been glued up all right that looks pretty good let's make sure that this is square and it is okay we're ready to commit to some glue [Music] okay there it is the clamps are holding the door down flat on the assembly table the bar clamps are drawing the joints together so in about four hours when we take this thing out of the clamps it should be perfectly square and flat the suspense is killing me it's been a couple hours and i'm taking the clamps off right now and we're going to see how flat this door is now i told you that the door wouldn't stick to the fixture now what i should have said is it won't stick to the fixture very hard every now and then depending on how much glue you're going to use you may have to pry this thing off and you can use one of your bar clamps to do it just like this there we go now let's this take this over to my registration plate and we'll see just how flat this is what i meant when i said my registration plate was the top of my table saw which is the biggest and flattest surface that i've got in my shop so let me just take the blade down below the surface here and we'll see what we've got flat as it can be flat as a die or as flat as a table saw as the saying goes so what would have happened if this wasn't flat if there had been a little rock here well no problem we can fix that back at the assembly table let me show you it's only been four hours since we glued this up so the glue is still pretty green it doesn't achieve its full hardness for say 24 to 48 hours depending on the type of glue you're using so if you've got a warp take a couple of wooden calls put those under the low corners to raise them up and then clamp down the high coin just like that now we'd normally leave that for anywhere from an hour to maybe overnight and then unclamp it and check it if you went too far you could always reverse the process not that hard in fact you can also reverse the process long after the glue has dried travis and i once built a bathroom cabinet beautiful thing made out of walnut uh square as as it could be but when we installed it the the wall wasn't flat so the cabinet itself twisted and one of the doors popped out about an eighth of an inch so i just removed the door put it on this uh this assembly table clamped it down just like i showed you here and uh warped the door so that it would fit the cabinet pretty neat trick huh what if your project has drawers as well as doors not a problem the assembly table will handle both this is a fairly standard drawer assembly half-blind dovetails hold the front to the sides and the back is set in dados now the difference between this assembly and the door you just saw was that these joints require us to apply clamping pressure along the length as well as across the width also this is a fairly deep drawer five inches deep so we need to put clamps at both the top and bottom of each corner to keep the pressure even along each corner joint and of course there are more clamps that hold the entire assembly down to the assembly table so that when the glue dries the drawer is dead flat with all these clamps it's absolutely essential that we do a dry clamp up first without glue so that we can plan which clamps to add when and the clamps don't start interfering with each other so here's my plan for this particular drawer assembly we start with four bar clamps all around the circumference of the assembly this not only holds the assembly together it squeezes it in against the fences and holds the assembly square next i add two clamps that hold the entire drawer assembly down against the assembly table and keep it flat now i'm just going to snug these up for right now i'll come back later after i've added all the other clamps and really tighten them down i've added two more clamps at the top to provide more pressure across the width here where i need it and finally i've added two corner squares diagonal from each other not only do these apply a little more clamping pressure but they also keep the top of the assembly perfectly square i want to say something more about these clamping squares now we're using them here as accessories to the assembly table but they are actually extremely useful clamping tools in their own right i use them all the time to glue up cabinets and other assemblies that are just too large to put on the table they're nothing more than a single piece of plywood cut so two edges are perfectly square to one another drill a few holes so that you can clamp them to the wood and then cut a couple of notches this notch in this corner keeps the the corner clamp from sticking to any glue squeeze out that might be in the corner and this notch right here well you'll see what this notch is for in the next glue up not long ago we combined an infinity cube with some clockworks and made what we call an infinity cube metal clock now the joinery is dirt simple it's just some open mortise and tenons but they all have to be assembled and glued up extremely precisely let's take a look at just five pieces here these three pieces in front right here form what i call the north frame and then these two pieces over here form the east frame all these parts the horizontal rails and the vertical posts that make up the frame have to be absolutely square and true and then the two assembled frames must be square to each other how do you do that well here's what the glue up look like using these two pieces of plywood and these two corner squares we were able to get all five parts perfectly aligned we used a glue up like this to do the top and the bottom frames then the northeast frame and then the southwest frame and then we took all those frames and we assembled them right here on the assembly table and that's the result the assembly table really shines when you have two or more boards that you want to glue edge to edge to make a wider board now as you can see i've got two scalloped fences that i've attached to the front and the back of the assembly table and these hold pipe clamps now i'm going to lay the boards in place and add a couple more clamps on top now we're going to add some clamping calls these are long hardwood boards that are crowned on one edge the reason for that crowning is because when you squeeze them together they'll provide equal clamping pressure all along their length so let me put these in place there the clamping calls align the boards in the middle and keep them even with each other now i have just two more clamps to add those two c-clamps at the ends keep the ends of the boards aligned there you go with this assembly table there is another non-traditional way to do an edge to edge glue up because the table itself is rigid you can use this instead of the bottom cult clamps let me show you [Music] these short bar clamps here at the far edge those keep the boards from lifting up when i apply the pressure with the pipe clamps that squeezes the boards together then these two short clamping calls and the c-clamps at the ends of the boards keep the boards perfectly lined up what if you need to do something longer this is than this assembly table or you want to glue up more than one door well you will notice that we've got slots in the top but also in the bottom so you can use this surface for uh glue ups as well as the other one you can glue up two doors or two drawers or a door in a drawer your choice and if you need something longer well you could always make another one of these tables let me conjure one up there you can daisy chain these if you want to you can either make a longer fence or use strips of plywood in between the two just join them up and if you do a lot of long or big glue ups you may need a bigger table i'll show you [Music] this one is a little more than twice the size of the little one that you see and yet it uses all the same measurements you see the slots are exactly six and three quarter inches uh apart centimeters for those of you who live outside the united states or myanmar or liberia the uh the holes in the sides and the stretchers are two inches apart or five centimeters so all you have to do is add to the length in six and three quarter inch segments or to the width in two inch segments make it as big and as long as you want these assembly tables can also help simplify other complicated gluing jigs that you may have to make for example right here when the cameras aren't rolling we're building pioneer aircraft and we need curved wooden parts for ribs and skids and other things so all we do is take a mold clamp it down to the assembly table and then add a bazillion c clamps and we're good to go one of the things that makes these assembly tables so incredibly useful is that they are incredibly simple think about it it's nothing more than a flat surface which has been slotted and perforated so that you can put a clamp anywhere you need it and they are incredibly simple to build you just cut a few strips drill a few holes write a few slots and put it all together from the information that i've just given you you should be able to design and build a table that fits your specific needs however if you would like some plans we do have those available at our shop they include the drawings for both the large and the small table and the dimensions are in both imperial and metric measurements so clamp on [Music] oh foreign

Channel: Workshop Companion

Views: 468,097

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Id: 1ujUF5skCzI

Length: 18min 16sec (1096 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 24 2021