Best Clamps for Clamping (Harbor Freight Clamps, Bessey Clamps, Kreg Clamps, Armor tool clamps)

hey today in the woodworking garage we're talking about clamps now i know it can be a boring subject but i'll do my best to make it interesting we're going to be talking about clamps of various sizes shapes colors brands price points so stick around [Music] [Applause] [Music] hey you know what people say about clamps well i'm not gonna say it take a look so i have a variety of clamps that i use in my shop some i use a little more some i use less and some i think i may not have used at all but i've collected them all and put them on the table here and i wanted to talk about them hey let's start right here this here is a four-way pressure clamp in which i use for making table tops i discovered this when i first started making table tops and you know over a parallel clamp this is a very budget-friendly alternative and it's it's really good it's it's very effective they're budget friendly and much cheaper than say a parallel clamp now pipe clamps can be very useful too and i used to have a bunch of pipe clamps that i was using for that i started using when i started building table tops but i got rid of those and and bought the four-way pressure clamp and i like it much better however i still have one pipe clamp in my shop and it's mostly used for attaching breadboard ends and that's why it's a 10 foot long pipe now if you're thinking about buying some of these pipe clamps they typically come in two sizes you can get them in one half inch and three quarter inch and when you buy them you're only buying the end hardware and you still have to buy the pipe separately and you can get it at any home center so just pay attention to whether or not you're getting the half inch clamp or the three quarter inch clamp and then buy the appropriate length of pipe now these are great for glue ups and you can buy these at the home center or you can buy them online but here's a caution for you there's a lot of brands being sold online that have a very narrow foot down here on the bottom and what happens when you're trying to use that pipe clamp and you're trying to set your boards up here for glue up these things like to fall over because the footing on the bottom is real narrow and it can be very aggravating i had some of those and i got rid of them when i bought this new pipe clamp recently i made sure i found a clamp that had a very wide stance here for a footing and it works very well it's very stable and it doesn't want to flop over when i'm trying to set up my boards for glue up this is a bessie brand clamp and it was only about two dollars more than some of the cheaper ones that i had found online and i also recommend a pipe clamp that has a nice rubber pad on both ends so that you're not damaging your wood now sometimes when i needed to clamp a large item and i didn't have a clamp that would fit i i would simply use a cargo strap and they work pretty well too especially for boxes when you're doing a glue up on a box and you want to put you can put the strap all the way around it in order to get a nice tight squeeze all the way around and you know a simple cargo strap works great as a clamp one of the most popular clamps in my shop would be the the craig face clamp when i use for building projects they're great for clamping two project pieces together to ensure that they're nice and flat before drilling in your pocket holes one of the great features about this face clamp from craig is that it's got an auto adjusting feature and that it allows you to clamp down oh yeah yeah yeah sometimes they work sometimes they don't there you go it allows you to clamp down on material of various thicknesses i'll tell you these creek clamps are junk material of various thicknesses okay armor tool has a similar clamp in which it has an auto adjust feature and it allows you to clamp material of various thicknesses without having to you know do the twisting knob down here on the end and adjust the clamp it's actually very effective they're pretty nice to have because it allows you to grab a clamp quickly and just clamp something down and keep on going now the kreg clamp there's the clamps that i started out with and they actually work quite well for a long time but one of the problems that they had is is the piston down here inside the clamp would jam up a lot and then as you saw sometimes you can't close it until you manipulate the little piston down below or our monkey with the adjustment knob to get it to on jam and then it would work just fine i haven't had these armor clamps very long but so far they've been working out very well for me so it's a different design and i'm hopeful that this is a clamp that's going to last a long time and work the way it should now craig does make this 90 degree clamp and armor doesn't make one yet but i'm told that there will be one coming out soon but it's a very useful clamp and again this one works fairly well most of the time again occasionally it gets jammed up down here and this little piston you just have to push down on it and monkey with a little bit adjust the knob the tensioning knob in order to get it to clamp correctly it's mostly used for clamping your work pieces that have pocket holes drilled into them you can set your work piece together put this end of your clamp down inside one of the holes and then clamp down on your work piece to hold it in place while you're putting a pocket screw into the other hole what often happens when you're trying to put pocket screws into holes that are drilled at a little bit of an angle is that the wood will tend to want to shift and slide a little bit it's really hard to keep it straight whereas this clamp right here keeps everything clamped down nice and tight and it will remain wherever you have it clamped now the one downside about using the face clamps or this 90 degree or what i like to call the pocket hole clamp is that the technology that goes into them is kind of expensive and you're going to spend about thirty dollars or so for each type of clamp and so that would be the downside my new friend over at 4321 woodworking uh did a video recently on this clamp right here and i saw his video and said hey i'm gonna have to check that out and so i purchased one i'm gonna put a link to his video up here and also uh down in the description below so you can go check out his channel now this is a very innovative clamp and that it is a face clamp but if you unscrew this these two little thumb screws right here you can actually rotate this around now it does require you to put the thumb screws back so it's a little cumbersome to use but how about that basically it's a two in one clamp now this is made over and you know where and so you know it's it's not the greatest now it's kind of innovative in that it allows you to rotate this around it's not very effective for using it as a as a pocket hole clamp because it well i don't think it was designed for that i'm thinking it was designed for maybe welding or or some metal work i'm not real sure but this piece here is far too long the clamp doesn't open up wide enough in order for you to actually get it in to a pocket hole like i just demonstrated with the craig but the whole concept and idea behind it is actually pretty awesome i would really like to see one of these other companies that has the auto adjusting that offers auto adjusting clamps come out with a similar device in which you could rotate and or maybe have an interchangeable part here where you could take off a face clamp and put on a 90 degree clamp or a pocket hole clamp so for the price that you're paying for buying two other clamps i'd be willing to pay just a little bit more even in order to get a clamp that was dual purpose like this um you know especially if it was an auto adjusting like the craig and the armor tool offers so hey tell me down in the description what you think is this something that you know you'd purchase for your shop if it was if it had a dual purpose i mean i think it's a great idea so let me know what you think another small face clamp that gets used a lot in my shop is this small little five inch clamp from craig and for those of you who've seen my videos i used to have the craig k4 pocket hole jig and and this was great because i could just quickly clamp the pocket hole jig down to the edge of my workbench and and that's mostly what i used it for i don't use that jig anymore and so i'm not sure if i'll be using this clamp very often now if you like buying budget friendly tools you probably have a couple of these budget friendly twisty clamps as i like to call them some people call them the bar clamp or f style clamp i like calling the twisty clamp because well you you know you got to do the old twisty thing they're very budget friendly you can get a six inch style clamp like this for three dollars you just can't find a cheaper clamp now a lot of people don't like these clamps because they're because they're cheap because they're cheap but i got to tell you what none of these clamps have broken with me occasionally i'll have a tip that falls off the end or something but that's been it like it just did they actually work very well and a lot of people just love them but here's something very important that you need to know if you have purchased these clamps or even looked at them have you noticed that there are now clamps that look exactly the same only one's got ones a little more blue and one's kind of a darker black color or dark gray did you know that there is actually a big difference in the two clamps let me show you now first let me show you that these are both made by pittsburgh they're both sold at harbor freight they're both the same price and in fact they both have the same model number 96210 and 96210 so they're sold under the same item number but there's a couple of important differences that you should know about the first being this little part of the clamp here that swivels back and forth these are made a little bit different this one here is straight whereas this one here is a little more cone-shaped and that's kind of important because when you're if you're opening these up all the way like this this little piece will hit the bottom of the the bottom part of this little bracket here and it won't always sit straight when it tightened up nice and tight it was kind of crooked it's made to to swivel back and forth which is a good feature i like that but this one over here which is the blue handled one it's shaped a little bit differently so when you tighten it up it actually it actually seats down inside the hole so it keeps this nice and flat and straight that's just one minor thing about the clamp the next important thing you need to know about this clamp is that the threads on the on the twisty handle are completely different on this one over here on the dark-handled one over here it can take up to 21 rotations to fully close this gap right here i counted 22. but on this blue handled one over here it's only nine so nine and a half rotations to get this to close up versus 21 rotations to get this one to close up though the same size clamp everything about them is everything else bottom is pretty much the same now another popular clamp from harbor freight is the trigger clamp or the squeeze clamp is what i like to call it now it's equally good quality i haven't had any of these break but these clamps serve a completely different purpose with these clamp with a trigger style clamp like this you can't get as much clamping pressure on two different work pieces if you're trying to hold something down because you're sitting here trying to squeeze this and it's just not the same kind of pressure as with a twisty clamp you can get a lot of pressure on those so i mostly use these as like a third set of hands when i'm working on something and and i need to hold something in place slightly while it's being glued up that doesn't require a lot of pressure that's where these clamps are perfect they're also very cheap uh you know this 12-inch clamp here i i think was like 4.99 maybe 5.99 i really like them for these pads that are right here on the ends these are this is a thick rubber pad and it allows you to really kind of get a bite a good grip on your work piece whereas some similar style clamps that are much more expensive you know they've got a really thin rubber coating piece here that doesn't offer much help or support at all and i've even seen some that were just a hard plastic between here which doesn't allow you to really grip your work piece at all and you can wiggle and slide it right off your work piece whereas having this nice rubber pieces here that are kind of thick really allows you to grip down on your work piece and that's one of the big benefits of these harbor freight clamps some people call them cheap i call them affordable now when i first started out i did go out and buy some of the blue and yellow clamps that are quite popular at the home center and these are handy they work pretty well i have lost some of the pads on here and and this is one of those hard plastic pads i was just telling you about it's i would much rather have a nice rubber piece on the end of my clamp here when i'm putting it up against my work piece rather than a hard plastic piece and of course this one has fallen off over time now this clamp operates just a little bit better i mean it's it's rather large handle so if you have smaller hands you're not going to enjoy it as much i've got large hands and it still seems a little big for me but i do like the release trigger which is right here makes it real nice and easy when you clamp down if you want to release it you just pinch it and it allows you to open it right back up whereas this is the downfall of the harbor freight clamp its release mechanism is just this little thumb trigger piece right here and when you have a lot of pressure on this clamp trying to push down on this to break it loose so that you can slide it backwards it's a little difficult so that's one of the downsides of the harbor freight clamps but you know it still works just fine [Applause] now i like using spring clamps in my shop and one of the reasons is to hold plastic up when i'm hanging plastic around my shop to create a paint booth and i'll put a link right up here for that one they're only 99 cents at the home center they're they're actually very very tight there's quite a bit of pressure on that clamp right there it's got these little rubber tips on the end that helps protect your work piece and then they work well now i saw a video once and where someone took one of those same spring clamps and they turned it into an edge clamp a by putting a bicycle inner tube piece over the end of the clamp and that was i thought was a great idea so i spent a lot of time trying to find the inner tube that was going to fit and and then i cut it up into pieces and forced each end onto the end of my clamp here and and it worked great for a short time what happens is the end of the spring clamp is just a little too sharp of an edge and after just a couple of uses as you can see the the rubber tire piece just kind of pulled through and although it's still effective it leaves a really sharp edge here now that can damage your work piece if you're you're clamping down on it so it works and it's a quick way to make a a cheap edge clamp but i really need to buy some real edge clamps and and get rid of these gimmicky ones that are broken now this next clamp really isn't really a clamp but it acts like a clamp and this is a new tool from armor tool company and they sent me one of these they sent me a couple of these to test out recently and i got to tell you for a pair of pliers that auto adjust these are actually turned out to be quite handy i've already used them several times in fact i have a couple of smaller ones that they sent that my wife has already cleaned because she does a lot of crafting projects and she has a crafting room and she said man these fit my hands and this is perfect and so well they're no longer in my shop but let me show you how well these work now i wouldn't necessarily advise you to use these on a woodworking project because of course it is a pair of pliers and it has some sharp teeth here but what's nice is it's self-adjusting and to release it it's got this nice big release handle right here that you just pull back on actually you can grab it with your pinky pull back on it and it opens it right up and then you can move on to another piece of material that's a different thickness and quickly clamp down on it and or here's a piece that's even thicker and clamp down on that and it's just a it's a great tool they develop there and it works well the clamping mechanism seems to be working just fine i've used it several times now like i said you know it's turned out to be quite handy around the shop but not necessarily for gripping your woodworking pieces because again it's got these sharp teeth but technically it's a but technically it acts as a clamp and so i wanted to include it on this video now mask a tool company i you probably saw that video recently of their pocket hole jig that i did they heard that i was going to be doing this clamp video so they sent me a couple clamps too and these are some brand new clamps for them and i haven't quite seen anything like it before it's kind of innovative and i don't know maybe you've seen something like this if so let me know down in the description below if you've even heard of or seen anything like this but but this is called a lever clamp and it's a lot similar to the f-style clamps that i just showed you you know you can it's got these nice thick rubber pads on both ends that i really like it easily slides upon the bar but to clamp it down you simply have this lever right here that you squeeze one time and that's it that's that's all you do now the clamping distance is pretty short because of that i haven't measured it but i'd say maybe a half an inch or so but it works very well let me show you so let's say we just needed to clamp down in this work piece here you would want to go ahead and and slide it closed as much as it will go but then just squeeze the clamp and it's there i mean that's that's not going anywhere that's a nice tight grip to release it you just push on this release lever right here you just grab it with your thumb even and it snaps loose and now this is their six inch version and they do have other sizes but i got to tell you it's uh i think it has real purpose in the woodworking shop especially with these really nice rubbery grip pads here it's nice not unlike the squeeze clamp where you have to squeeze it several times in order to kind of get it tightened up with this one it allows you just to grab this thing right here and give it a nice tight squeeze and and you're golden you have to check their product page but if i'm not mistaken i believe this was something like 450 pounds of pressure that it can handle so it's a well-made device and it seems we have really good quality so far so it's it's definitely got a place in my shop now don't get it confused with this other clamp that maska just came out with and this is called a gear clamp and it operates much the same way in which it slides easily upon the bar and you squeeze the trigger to lock it down however the big difference here is you only have a rubber pad you only have a rubber pad on one side this other side over here is just all metal now i tested it out on a piece of pine and it grips pretty good this tends to want to slip just a little bit and more importantly on a soft wood like a piece of pine it does tend to want to leave a small indention in your wood which isn't very good for a woodworking project but if you're doing metal works and some other or some other type of work you know this is also a it's a very good clamp it's it's a slightly different clamping mechanism in here so it's the whole thing is designed just a little bit different but it functions the same way you tighten it up upon your work piece or whatever it is you're clamping and you squeeze the trigger down to where it's nice and tight it's got a slightly different uh trigger release here but again like i said it functions the same way other than you do have this metal pad here instead of a nice rubber pad so there's going to be links down in the description for these as well i encourage you to go check them out now here's a type of hold down clamp it came with my miter saw it attaches to the back of my miter saw and basically it allows you to put a work piece on your miter saw and kind of hold it down a little bit before you start cutting and i've never really used it for that i haven't had a need for it but it is a clamp and it's in my shop and so i wanted to show it but i just don't have any use for it here's another clamp that came from another tool and and you're probably a little familiar with these right all of our old pocket hole jigs were made this way with this uh push style type clamp and this one actually came off of the mask pocket hole jig that i now have in my shop but you know i'm not a fan of this when i can have this now this is another one of those clamps from armor tool and just as a reminder they don't sponsor my video they don't sponsor my channel but they do have some good quality tools they've sent me some things and i really like them so i wanted to talk about them they have this clamp upgrade kit that fits on the mask pocket hole jig it also fits on the craig k4 and and the wind and some of the other budget friendly pocket hole jigs it's got the same hole pattern and they send you everything you need in order to just swap out that clamp and so that's where this clamp came from and i'm sure i can reuse this for something in my shop i just haven't come up with a need for it if you have any suggestions on what i could use this for please let me know i'd like to put it to use now i have a couple of these hold down hold down clamps that are made for t-tracks you can just pop it into a t-track and and clamp down on it and and hold a work piece i i bought some of these because i i made a a tapering jig for my table saw it wasn't a very good build and it didn't last too long and well eventually i ended up buying this tapering jig from rockler it's got the same style clamp on it but it's really good because it allows you to it allows you to adjust it because it's got the same t-bolt on the bottom you can adjust this up at different height and then clamp down on a board that you plan on sending through your table saw to cut at an angle so that style of clamp works very well it's pretty specific in how it can be used a similar hold down clamp is this little guy right here and i found these online and and i found them to be very useful in fact i i use one over at my miter station i have this i have this one over here right near my miter station because i can use a scrap piece of wood and set it up here and clamp it down and use it as a stop block for my miter saw it's pretty handy to have and and it operates well it holds nicely and because it has these four mounting holes you can pretty much mount it anywhere now here's a little clamp i use i found at the home center and it's mostly used for holding cables and wires together but it works very well i recently had a company from well you know where reach out to me and they wanted to send me this corner clamp to test out and review and i started making a video on it and i'll stick it right up here and just let you look some sheet goes together maybe you're making a cabinet or something like that then the process is you you need to kind of hold this into place get your wood lined up kind of put this up here hold it into place like this and then you're going to want to slip on slip this in the hole and tighten it down if if you need to make an adjustment over here uh for instance the the boards aren't lining up back here and i need to slide this board over a little bit and it's clamped in there pretty good to loosen this up you got to be careful because then things start just falling apart on you now the material it's a it's a good quality device i checked i checked it for square and it is at 90 degrees so it's good for that but that you just saw it's cumbersome to use because these little guys just they fall out and they're designed that you just stick them down in this hole and then you've got this metal piece right here that you can that you can use to tighten down on and it's designed for you to use four different you know two clamps on either side and and well it's just hard to use because these things just keep keep falling out now here's a corner clamp that does work pretty well and again i'll show you the video right here it's made by craig tool company if you're familiar with craig's clamps you know it has an this auto adjusting auto max feature here where it self adjusts according to the board thickness that you're using you just take your wood pieces open up the jaws slip it on and tighten it down like this was not set up okay this this is just how it is like i said it's it's made by craig tool company um it works well when it when it works but again it's the same clamping mechanism down here the auto adjusting that they have it's it works sometimes and sometimes it just doesn't work at all hey that's two fails by craig toole company that's two clamp fails by craig toole company let me know in the description if you have their clamps and if you're having some problems with them you know when i first got these they seemed to work great i never used this one much but the few times that i have used it it worked okay but it seems like here recently whenever i grabbed it it's just it locks and here it is it's locked again just does not want to open up now here's a couple more clamps you know we've all you've seen hose clamps you may use them for your dust collection that dust collection system or something the problem with these is you know you got this little common head screw here you got a twisty twisty twisty to open and close and it's kind of cumbersome i recently purchased these they're a little bit better it's got this little thumb screw right here and and it allows you to at least do it manually by hand to open and close it does take a lot of rotations to open and close this clamp but it's a little better than working with a common screwdriver similarly i like using these little hose clamps that you just simply pinch and it opens and closes i primarily use in fact i primarily use those on the end of my dust collection hose it allows me to squeeze it and adjust it up and down and when i attach my hose to some of the the tools that i use here in the shop i can quickly adjust it and it clamps down in the hose and kind of holds it in place and so that works pretty well now here's a corner clamp that i do like i i don't use it much in fact if you saw my video on tools that i wasted money on i believe this was on there basically i haven't had a need for it much but if i did this actually would work very well it allows you to take two pieces of wood and you can go up to one and a half inches thick and as little as a half inch like like a half inch sheet of plywood but you can you can put it in two pieces of wood like this and then clamp it down and the result is you get a nice 90 degree turn a nice 90 degrees however one of the problems i've found with this is just as you see right here sometimes when it clamps down especially on wider boards you end up getting a little bit of a gap now lastly there's two clamps i want to talk about that are new to my shop and again if you recognize the color this this is an armored tool device but they sent me these dog clamps recently and and in fact they also sent me this real nice table over here i'll show you in a moment but these dog clamps are great because it's the same style of clamp that you that i've used on my pocket hole jigs now only it comes with this peg not that that's the technical name for it i'm not sure what you call this part of the of the clamp but it drops down inside your dog hole on your table and and allows you to clamp work pieces and i'll show you what i'm talking about so let's say we needed to assemble something or or maybe we're just simply working with a piece of wood maybe you're going to do some hand planing on it and you need a way to clamp it down this little dog fence is perfect for that you put a dog fence on one side you can put your wood there and and then use this dog clamp to simply clamp down on it and it's sturdy it's nice and tight and it's not going anywhere now you don't have to have a special table to use this clamp in fact all you need to do is drill a three-quarter inch hole in your workbench and then this will drop right down inside that hole it's great because you can rotate it 360 degrees and get it from different angles now a similar but different clamp is the auto adjust horizontal dog clamp in which it has this much longer peg here that drops down inside your hole and it allows you to clamp down on work pieces of various thicknesses hey i don't know about you but i'm a little tired of talking about clamps it's taken me almost two and a half hours to film this video by the time i get it edited i'm hoping to have it down to about 20 minutes or so but you know but look right down there and or maybe but hey whatever whatever it turns out to be it turns out to be i hope you've seen value in some of these clamps that i described to you today and i'm going to try to have as many links to these clamps down in the description below in case there's anything that you see that you're interested in you can go ahead and click on those and go check out pricing and more information about it if you like this video please give me a thumbs up if you have any questions you can drop them in the comments below and i'll try to get to those as soon as i can and right over here i'm going to go ahead and throw up a couple other videos that you might be interested in and if you go ahead and click on those i'll see you on the other side hey thanks for watching and i'll see you again soon

Channel: E-Bike Reviews

Views: 103,815

Keywords: Woodworking, Woodworking for beginners, Clamps, clamping, best clamps, corner clamps, spring clamps, bar clamps, pipe clamps, Kreg Clamps, bessey clamps, armor tool clamps, face clamp, woodworking tools

Id: VAoK9lk6t6Q

Length: 33min 50sec (2030 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021