Dr.Al
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- Location
- Gloucestershire, UK
Earlier in the week, I came home to a large package, sent to me (apropos of nothing) from a very generous member of this parish. Thank you again @northwest. This is what was in the package:
I have a few cam clamps from Klemmsia and they come in handy for some jobs. The ones I have are much shorter than these: I've never seen long bar versions of them. One of the clamps had a damaged head as you can see in this photo:
I'd been wavering a bit on what to do as my next project so that was an additional bonus on top of receiving free clamps in the post: I've got a little repair job to work on.
Only one of the clamp heads is broken but I decided that I'd try to replace the pair. The main reason for that is that I thought there was a fairly high chance I'd mess one of them up and in that case I'd have a spare. However, if all goes well I'll just replace the two heads so they match.
I started with these two bits of beech, bandsawn off a larger lump:
If you look closely at the photo, you'll notice that there's a diagonal line in the face of the broken clamp. That's from a hacksaw, which I used to cut a deeper slot in a slotted screw so that I could remove it (mainly to see how long it was). Given the head is broken, it didn't seem like a particularly big deal to cut into the face with the hacksaw and that made it much easier to cut the slot in the screw.
The next job was a lot of planing with the #4½...
... and a bit of shooting with the low-angle jack:
The beech pieces ready to be used:
The first thing I did was clamp the broken piece onto each of the beech blocks and use some transfer punches to transfer the positions of the roll pin holes and the relief hole at the bottom of the slit. I also drew round what was left of the body:
The pencil lines then got extended, using the whole clamp body for the curved line and an edge distance gauge for the straight one:
I also marked up the locations of the two mortices in each block:
The (4 mm) holes for the roll pins and the (initially 3 mm) hole for the slit end relief got drilled on the pillar drill:
I also drilled the two ends of the bar hole mortice with a 5.5 mm drill. Normally, I'd leave the ends square, but the original clamps had rounded ends so I thought I'd copy that design:
There was then quite a bit of work done with a 4 mm mortice chisel (the next size down I had from the 5.5 mm-ish size of the slot in the existing clamps):
The two holes roughed out:
Taking advantage of the fact that my new-ish 3D-printer is much faster than the old one and can knock something like this up in a little over 20 minutes, I printed a little paring guide and used it with an 18 mm chisel to widen the slot:
A quick test fit:
I've got quite a lot further than that today but that feels like enough for one post so I'll continue with this little adventure tomorrow.
I have a few cam clamps from Klemmsia and they come in handy for some jobs. The ones I have are much shorter than these: I've never seen long bar versions of them. One of the clamps had a damaged head as you can see in this photo:
I'd been wavering a bit on what to do as my next project so that was an additional bonus on top of receiving free clamps in the post: I've got a little repair job to work on.
Only one of the clamp heads is broken but I decided that I'd try to replace the pair. The main reason for that is that I thought there was a fairly high chance I'd mess one of them up and in that case I'd have a spare. However, if all goes well I'll just replace the two heads so they match.
I started with these two bits of beech, bandsawn off a larger lump:
If you look closely at the photo, you'll notice that there's a diagonal line in the face of the broken clamp. That's from a hacksaw, which I used to cut a deeper slot in a slotted screw so that I could remove it (mainly to see how long it was). Given the head is broken, it didn't seem like a particularly big deal to cut into the face with the hacksaw and that made it much easier to cut the slot in the screw.
The next job was a lot of planing with the #4½...
... and a bit of shooting with the low-angle jack:
The beech pieces ready to be used:
The first thing I did was clamp the broken piece onto each of the beech blocks and use some transfer punches to transfer the positions of the roll pin holes and the relief hole at the bottom of the slit. I also drew round what was left of the body:
The pencil lines then got extended, using the whole clamp body for the curved line and an edge distance gauge for the straight one:
I also marked up the locations of the two mortices in each block:
The (4 mm) holes for the roll pins and the (initially 3 mm) hole for the slit end relief got drilled on the pillar drill:
I also drilled the two ends of the bar hole mortice with a 5.5 mm drill. Normally, I'd leave the ends square, but the original clamps had rounded ends so I thought I'd copy that design:
There was then quite a bit of work done with a 4 mm mortice chisel (the next size down I had from the 5.5 mm-ish size of the slot in the existing clamps):
The two holes roughed out:
Taking advantage of the fact that my new-ish 3D-printer is much faster than the old one and can knock something like this up in a little over 20 minutes, I printed a little paring guide and used it with an 18 mm chisel to widen the slot:
A quick test fit:
I've got quite a lot further than that today but that feels like enough for one post so I'll continue with this little adventure tomorrow.
