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Changed my view on glue ups after 4 years of scrambling, a clamp rack in my West Hartford garage fixed it
For 4 years I did every glue up the same dumb way: clamps piled in a bucket, hunting for the right size while the glue set up. Two weeks ago a guy named Ray at the lumber yard in West Hartford showed me his shop and he had 30 clamps hanging on a wall rack, each one labeled by length. I built one that weekend out of scrap plywood and 2x4s, and my last face frame glue up took 6 minutes instead of the usual 20. I always figured a rack was something you did once you had a real building, not a one car garage with a table saw in it. If you hang your clamps, what do you do for the odd sizes that won't fit the main slots?
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king.andrew1d ago
Man, I gotta say I see it the other way. A rack of 30 clamps all matched and labeled sounds real nice, but half my clamps are yard sale finds in random sizes, and those odd ones are the ones I reach for most. What happens when you need a 43 inch clamp and all your slots are cut for even numbers? I'd rather keep the weird lengths loose in a bucket close to the bench than force them into a system that doesn't fit. The rack works for the guy with 30 of the same brand, but for the rest of us it just means one more thing to organize around.
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milesj701d ago
How many of those yard sale clamps are actually different lengths, or are most of them just the same few sizes with a couple oddballs? I ask because I ran into the same thing, and when I actually measured mine I had about four sizes doing 90 percent of the work. The odd ones I hang on a separate board with hooks spaced wider, no slots, so a 43 inch clamp still goes up sideways or angled. Nothing says every clamp has to sit in a cut slot, the rack just has to get them off the bench and in sight. Sounds like your real problem is you reach for the odd ones most, so maybe those are the ones that should be front and center, not the matched set.
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