I’m in the process of gluing up various components of the nightstand. I started with the rear panel, and actually did this with a rubbed joint (because I trust my rubbed joints enough to put them in a place where no one will see them).
The shelf on the bottom is made of two thicker pieces. I got out the clamps for this job, and it went about as well as it usually goes. My old bar clamps went underneath and I put a couple of F-clamps on the top. The bar clamps constantly fell over as I was working, as usual, and they’re really heavy, but eventually, I got the thing together.
Then it was time for the top, and a little voice in my head told me that if the bar clamps weren’t always falling over when I was trying to get stuff glued up, they might be a lot more pleasant to use. So I cut off a few sections of a 2×4 and made some stands. What a difference this made!
This took very little time to get set up and in place; because the screws to tighten the clamp are at the ends of the bars and free of obstruction, it was a piece of cake to swing the handles around. I also began to appreciate the impressive clamping power that these things have. The additional F-clamps I started with were the smaller, light-duty ones. Then I noticed that the bars on those were bowing a bit, so I switched to a heavier-duty clamp that was a little bit better (see above), but nothing like the bar clamps. It did not occur to me to use a couple of pipe clamps that I’m currently borrowing, sigh.
Let’s take a closer look at those clamp stands, made from a typical douglas-fir 2×4. You can tell that I really went all-out with the details on these. It’s funny how something so simple and cheap can make so much difference.
After going through all of this, I started wondering to myself how much it would cost to get a few more bar clamps, because I’ll be needing something to help out with other glue-ups in the future. Yikes, they sure do cost more than the $2 that these cost me. I guess I’ll be either borrowing clamps more or trawling more estate sales to get my fix.
#1 by Jeff on July 14, 2010 - 2:45 pm
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Just found your blog. I purchased 6′ pipe clamps to help with my last project and did some quick on-line shopping especially since FWW magazine had recommended some particular ones, but they were expensive. So I went with the standard pipe clamp kind of like what you have and they were still about $60 for two.
#2 by Brian on July 14, 2010 - 3:24 pm
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Hi Jeff, yeah, they aren’t cheap. The problem with clamps is that it seems that you can find lots of them cheap at yard sales and the like, but you end up paying for a new one every now and then because you don’t have one at the time that you need it.
For pipe clamps, if you need to make stands for them, try boring a hole into the center of a 2×4, then sawing it in half.