Paul Sellers
Published on 15 Jul 2016Clamps are an essential piece of equipment around the workshop. Paul shows how he retrofits a standard aluminium sash clamp to be much more effective.
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May 13, 2019
Clamp Retrofit | Paul Sellers
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Finally getting around to posting this video encouraged me to get out to the workshop and do some of this upgrading to a couple of pairs of cheap aluminum clamps I’d bought from Princess Auto earlier this year. Once I got started, I saw that the clamps didn’t need as much done to them as the examples Paul works on in the video. The tommy bars are held in place with locknuts, so I didn’t need to peen the ends as he did. The jaws are significantly taller and a bit wider than the clamps he works on, and have softer plastic faces on both jaws, so I didn’t need to use plywood pads. This left the main task (other than minor tune-up of the screw mechanism) of inserting wooden cores in the hollow beams.
I cut the rough-sized wood inserts to fit approximately to the interior dimensions of the aluminum beams, then planed them down to a snug fit. One thing I did differently was using my small plough plane to cut a groove on the top side of the insert, to just clear the punched indents for the movable jaw. On one of them, I didn’t quite do as good a job of planing the insert down, and it was a much tighter fit than the other three. After about the half-way point, it refused to go any further so I had to use a mallet to persuade it to finish going all the way in.
Still, I think the modification does what Paul said it does: the clamps are much more rigid and I certainly can’t induce any twist in the beam (as I could before I put the wooden inserts in).
Comment by Nicholas — May 13, 2019 @ 22:07