Woodworking Tips and Tricks / 5 Hacks for Clamps

hello everyone I'm calling commit and today I'm going to show you some of the tricks that I use in my workshop everything I show you today is going to be just to do with clamping and I'm only going to show you five items because there are five items that I think you'll really benefit from I know I have if I showed you 15 or 20 of them if you're like me you probably forget most of them but this way maybe some of them you'll remember and you'll be able to use the first thing I want to show you is just simple gluing of boards and of course when you glue boards together and here a woodworker you'll do lots of that and the board slip around very often they're a little bit warped one side or another as much as you try to get them straight and flat and when you glue them up and clamp them together sometimes you'll get the centers are nice and flat but the out out sides I like to get the santer's flat first of all and then the outsides are warped but what do you do well very simple you can get yourself a block of woods just some scrap wood I like to use something close to an inch wide you take it over to your drill press and drill a hole through it and that that size doesn't matter then you go to your table saw of course and cut them in half and now look at what you can do now you can take these and you can make different sizes of them and you put them on either side of your board and when you clamp these together it aligns your boards because these are easily to move and now your boards are nice and flat together and look the glue doesn't stick because there's an air space in there and now you can leave these boards sit for half an hour so whatever the time that you do that so that the glue dries enough you can take this all off and now you can just scrape that wood off and you don't have a mess like you would if you used like a c-clamp that squishes all the glue together and make a much better cleaner glueing job sometimes after I've clamped my wood together I find that the boards are still not together in the even if I started off that way the glue has slipped enough and I can still use these but further on in the board now you might even my biggest C clamp won't reach in and this is just a narrow board here it still won't reach in far enough but I can still use these now I could use them with a C clamp for narrower places but sometimes I'm I'm further in or I've got wider boards well for that you can use a clamping extension and all this is is some scrap wood it's about an inch and a quarter wide I put a hinge in there just to sort of keep it together and I just put a couple of jaws on the side of it to offset it and again you can use these same things you just put them position them between the the glue joint and you can put them on like that and now you can reach as far in as you want and what you do now is you just put one of your clamps on there and of course the closer to the wood you can get it but you'll get the idea here that now you've got pressure right on that glue joint and you've got a way of keeping those boards together let's talk about gluing picture frames or in some cases doors together and I know a lot of you like to make picture frames because I get emails from you how do you glue these together there's lots of different ways of doing it this is one way that I use now sometimes you're only gluing some corners you're only doing maybe you're doing a repair or something and all you do for this a game is drill a hole somewhere and we like to have we never like to have these areas meet in here we like to have some space for the the very tip to be free and the same with this and that's why we drill the holes we put the Center underneath there and the top over top and check this out we can now use one of our clamps like this and these just clamp together it's unbelievable you know you can lift it up like that it's they clamp together very very well another thing you can do using the same sort of corner braces like that make sure that you take a minute to line up each one of them because they can be a little bit of skew when you first line them up so you need to take a second to make sure that the corners line up to a nice point on each side and then you can take one of these tie-down devices and I've actually seen these at at the dollar store they're inexpensive but you know what for this they would work just fine and wrap it around tie them together and then you can just tighten them up and you can buy this whole concept commercially but you know what you can make your own for not very much money and it works just as well and you can see because I took a second here to line these up all the points are coming together very nicely but look at the corners you know you've got nice tight corners there a very quick and easy way of clamping and still talking about clamping you know I work alone in my workshop and sometimes I could use another set of hands and these things are absolutely priceless to me when it comes to assembly and you need somebody to hold some wood for you these things are really easy to make all you take is in this case I took an 8-inch square piece of plywood I just cut it off wheel again we always nip off the corners so that we don't interfere with corners and edges the same as we did with these exactly the same principle but look at how easy these things work now it's like having another set of hands and that's nice and firm there in this case I'm gonna take it to the edge of my workbench I can now clamp it down and you know that's how sturdy that is really handy little third and well and that's it five quick little workshop hacks that you can make the little circles for gluing the the clamp with the two pieces together where you can glue the corner together the same thing only now using a tie-down strap so that's number three at number four of course was this little handy thing and number five is the clamp extension and that's gonna come in handy to you every time you do a glue up from now on I'm calling canet for woodwork web thanks for watching you

Channel: WoodWorkWeb

Views: 1,584,648

Rating: 4.9425688 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking hacks, woodworking tips, woodworking, woodworking tips and techniques, woodworking tips and tricks, woodworking class, woodworking tip, tips and tricks, woodworking hack, woodworking tricks, clamp hacks, clamp, woodworking how to, clamps, bar clamp, diy hacks for woodworkers, woodwork tips and tricks, wood clamp, wooden clamps, wooden clamp

Id: Pp7b-kziLqU

Length: 7min 36sec (456 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 15 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/WoodsDesign]

My favorite things to build are jigs.

[u/SittingInAnAirport]

Wish I would have seen this a few weeks ago! Haha.

Great tips, thanks!

[u/skullcutter]

simple and elegant. thanks.

[u/uncivlengr]

I don't know that the mitre clamp with pieces of wood will do anything to clamp the joint tight - it'll hold the pieces where they are, for sure, but for all the inward pressure the outer piece imparts, the wedge on the inside is going to try to drive them apart.

Lots of other good tips, though.