Credit For Clever Corner Clamp

We love this design’s simplicity, but its mundane appearance is deceptive because a lot is going on here. [Bas van Hassel]’s clamp looks like a bench cookie or maybe a compressed hockey puck, but one pie piece-shaped quadrant extends on dovetails to form a right-angle channel, perfect for holding your ninety-degree joint while your glue dries. Opposing disc edges are flat, so your clamp won’t slip. Divots on the top and bumps on the bottom keep your stacks nice and neat when you put them away. All around, we have no trouble believing this designer has spent a lot of hours in the woodshop.

As long as your wood pieces are the same thickness, it seems like a practical use of printer filament, but if you have different sizes, you can always pull the dovetail out of its groove. Thanks to the scaling feature built into slicing programs, we expect some precision makers to utilize this in projects like dollhouses and model airplanes. If you have a high-resolution printer, you could make some miniature tools to construct a flea circus set. At that point, you may need to make some smaller clamps.

Print orientation for the puck is straightforward as it is a print-in-place design, but sometimes it isn’t always clear, so listen to those who know better and don’t be afraid of gears in your vises.

 

 

28 thoughts on “Credit For Clever Corner Clamp

    1. It’s also stackable. Construction time: 5 minutes with a forstner bit and a rip saw.

      >we have no trouble believing this designer has spent a lot of hours in the woodshop.

      Some perhaps, but not enough to come up with the most obvious solutions.

      1. Or you simply could accept that different people approach different things differently!

        I don’t see why your link is “better”, it’s just another solution to the same problem.

        1. Well, if you’re an experienced woodworker in need of a corner clamp, how would you make it as your first option?

          For somebody who’s putting together IKEA furniture, I can see this as an option, but if your go-to solution for creating clamps and fixtures for woodworking is a 3D printer, then you’re not much of a woodworker.

          And, it’s better because it doesn’t require the two joined pieces to be the exact same thickness.

          1. So a bought, well-made corner clamp, be it metal or plastics, is bad as well and makes you an IKEA furniture assembler, too? Because he, maybe only for this tool, didn’t use wood scraps? Come on…

            After all he put an idea out there and shares it for free with everyone…

          2. Table saw is ALL DONE while the 3d printer is still putting it’s pants on. If I was to print a corner clamp it would be to save clamps if I’m short, so it would not need a clamp to work. you don’t need much just to hold it square while you nail or glue. I don’t like the round spot the clamp has to use, but then it wouldn’t be a cookie.

          3. >So a bought, well-made corner clamp, be it metal or plastics, is bad as well

            No. A set of clamping squares from a HW store would be an expedient option, since you’ll probably need many of them, and they’re cheap enough. The irony is that nowadays they sell wooden versions of clamps for the hobbyists who want “authentic” tools rather than the cheap cast metal versions.

            If the premise is that you’re a woodworker and you have an access to a shop and wood, this is just 3D printing for the sake of 3D printing, because it makes no sense to go through the CAD/CAM and 8 hours of printing to have one clamp, let alone four or eight.

            If your use case is assembling pre-cut particle boards in your city apartment, then you got to make do with what you have, which may be 3D printing instead of going to the local HW store.

          4. @Dude I think the main reason to sell wooden clamps over cast metal ones is they have a good grip force but won’t mar the work piece as easily, being both soft and wide contact patch… Sure you can say you should always have sacrificial blocks in the way etc – but that means finding useful scraps to make the blocks with, retrieving them when they inevitably fall behind the bench…

            As for the overall topic at hand, if this works for you, its a useful tool – also 3d printed filament in that is almost certainly dirt cheap.. The decent bits of timber you might have to cut up to make a clamp or 8 are probably not, and its stock you’d rather use for something else. So 3d printing could always be your chosen option – I have almost no material storage space, so being able to keep the good wood stocks for use only when really needed helps keep things tidier – as minimum order for delivery overflows my space every time, where the volume a handful of spools can useful unpack to via the printer…

            (also as a well tuned 3d printer is fire and forget it lets you churn out all the clamps you will need, cheaply, while you can spend your time sourcing materials, designing around what you can get, cutting the parts, and that vital thing to humans sleeping…)

          5. The important thing to remember in making your own corner clamps is to make them in pairs of 89 and 91 degrees or you won’t get all 4 sides to line up. ;-)

    1. I wonder if for the same volume, if 3d printing a cylinder verses a cube would be quicker because the head wouldn’t have to decelerate at the corners on each layer. I would assume the extra material would be negligible though unless the infill percentage was high.

  1. Thats rad. Love weird clamps. Also like the slide and alignment approach. Not a woodworker – but have to stick things together made of wood from time to time so love this sort of thing.

  2. does a good job of holding th eboards at a right angle but doesn’t apply clamping pressure to the joint. in fact, the clampng pressure is perpendicular to the glue joint which tends to make for a weak glue joint.

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