clamp

23 Articles

Rusty bathtub outdoors on equally rusty car springs

Hot Rod Backyard Bath On Steel Spring Legs

May 31, 2025 by 16 Comments

In a fusion of scrapyard elegance and Aussie ingenuity, [Mark Makies] has given a piece of old steel a steamy second life with his ‘CastAway Tub’. Call it a bush mechanic’s fever dream turned functional sculpture, starring two vintage LandCruiser leaf springs, and a rust-hugged cast iron tub dug up after 20 years in hiding. And put your welding goggles on, because this one is equal parts brute force and artisan flair.

What makes this hack so bold is, first of all, the reuse of unforgiving spring steel. Leaf springs, notoriously temperamental to weld, are tamed here with oxy-LPG preheating, avoiding thermal shock like a pro. The tub sits proudly atop a custom-welded frame shaped from dismantled spring packs, with each leaf ground, clamped, torched, and welded into a steampunk sled base. The whole thing looks like it might outrun a dune buggy – and possibly bathe you while it’s at it. It’s a masterclass in metalwork with zero CAD, all intuition, and a grinder that’s seen things.

Inspired? For those with a secret love for hot water and hot steel, this build is a blueprint for turning bush junk into backyard art. Read up on the full build at Instructables.

Simple Hardware Store Hack Keeps Your PCBs Right Where You Want Them

January 16, 2025 by 30 Comments

Sometimes it’s the simplest hacks that make the biggest impact.

Take these DIY magnetic PCB vises for example. Sure, you can go out and buy purpose-built tools, but [Dylan Radcliffe] just made a trip to the hardware store for some nuts and bolts. He chose 3/8″-16 bolts, which would probably be around M10 for the rest of the world. The head of each bolt is ground flat so a ceramic disc magnet can be attached to it with CA glue, while the head of the bolt gets a plastic washer glued to it. Another plastic washer gets glued to a nut, which when threaded onto the bolt provides the light clamping force needed to hold a PCB. Make four of those and stick them to a steel plate with the magnets, and you can stop chasing your boards around the bench with a soldering iron.

As much as we like this idea — and we do; we’re heading to Home Depot to buy the needed parts this very evening — we can think of a few useful modifications. With a long bolt and two nuts rather than one, you could make a set of vises that are easily adjustable along the Z-axis. This could prove useful to those of us working under a microscope. Also, rather than making the bolts the magnetic part we bet you could lay down a flexible magnetic sheet, the kind you can feed into a printer to roll your own fridge magnets. We suspect that would hold the bolts firmly enough for most work while still allowing easy repositioning. We’d also favor flange nuts over plain hex nuts, to give a larger clamping area. We’d still include the plastic washers, though, or possibly switch to rubber ones.

There’s more than one way to skin this cat, of course, especially if you’ve got a Harbor Freight nearby and a well-stocked Lego bin.

A person putting a screw into a CNC spoil board on the left of the image. Their drill is chartreuse and black. Clamps hold a rectangular board down at all four corners. The spindle of the CNC is just visible on the right hand side of the image.

Workholding Options For The Beginner CNC Operator

July 23, 2024 by 6 Comments

Designing a file to cut on a CNC is only part of the process. You also have to keep it in place while the machine does its work. [Garrett Fromme] walks us through five different work holding techniques.

Since every project is different and stock material can vary from thin veneer to much larger pieces, there’s no one right work holding method for every project, and not all methods are applicable to all materials. A vise is great for small projects that need to be held very securely and won’t be damaged, vacuum tables can make switching pieces quick in a production environment, fasteners will hold a piece securely at the expense of your spoil board, clamps are fairly versatile but fiddly to setup, and tape and CA glue are quick but require more consumables.

[Fromme] does a quick demonstration of setups with these different methods and their limitations, which is a great place to start for the beginner CNC operator. Just like 3D printers, CNCs are a far cry from the replicators in Star Trek that can automagically create what you ask it to, but proper workholding lets you waste less material and operate the machine more safely.

Our own [Elliot Williams] had a look at how CNCs aren’t as automated as you think. If you do need some CNC clamps, you might try these printable parametric clamps, or if you want something more beautiful, give these metal toe clamps a go.

Continue reading “Workholding Options For The Beginner CNC Operator” →

OpenSCAD Cranks Out Parametric CNC Clamps

June 11, 2024 by 7 Comments

If you’ve ever used a CNC router or mill, you’ll know how many little things need to go right before you get anything resembling acceptable results. We could (and probably should?) run a whole series of posts on selecting the correct bit for the job at hand and figuring out the appropriate feeds and speeds. But before you even get to that point, there’s something even more critical you need to do: hold the workpiece down so it doesn’t blast off into orbit when the tool touches it.

Now that might sound like an easy enough job, and for basic flat stock, it often is. But if you’ve got an oddly shaped piece of material, you’ll quickly realize how inadequate those trusty c-clamps really are. When you get to that point, it might time to check out these OpenSCAD hold down clamps from [ostat]. Thanks to its parametric nature, you can plug whatever dimensions you need into the script, and in a few seconds it will spit out an STL file for a bespoke clamp that you can print out and put to work.

Continue reading “OpenSCAD Cranks Out Parametric CNC Clamps” →

Harbor Freight And LEGO PCB Vise Is Cheap And Effective

February 7, 2024 by 6 Comments

It doesn’t take much chasing things around the bench with a soldering iron to appreciate the value of good work holding. And don’t get us started on those cheap “helping hands” alligator clip thingies; they’re somehow worse than no work holding. Isn’t there a better way?

Maybe, judging by [Paul Bryson]’s idea for a dirt cheap PCB vise. It’s a pretty clever design that’ll have you heading to Harbor Freight, or whatever the moral equivalent is in your location, where you’ll pick up a small ratcheting bar clamp. [Paul] used a 4″ (10 cm) clamp; that which looks fine for a wide range of boards, but we suppose you could go bigger if you like. You could also stop there and just clamp your PCBs in the plastic jaws, but [Paul] adorned the jaws with swiveling arms made from LEGO Technic pieces, of all things. Rubber grommets slipped onto Technic pegs go into the holes on the beam to hold the PCB edges firmly, while the swiveling action adapts to odd-shaped boards.

To our mind, the biggest advantage to this design other than cost is how low it holds the PCB — a decided advantage while working under the microscope. Don’t have any Technics parts close to hand? No worries, 3D printed parts could easily stand in, and maybe even improve the design. [Paul] also shows off a substitute for the Technics beam rendered in PCB material, which would reduce the height of the workpiece over the bench even more.

We’ve seen a lot of PCB vises come and go, using everything from scrap wood to 3D printed compliant mechanisms. But we doubt you’ll find anything more cost-effective than [Paul]’s design.

An unfastened piece of pipe in a drill press, rotating away

Drill Press Piece Fastening 101

April 17, 2022 by 16 Comments

What are the options you have for securing your workpiece to the drill press table? [Rex Krueger] shows us that there’s plenty, and you ought to know about them. He goes through the disadvantages of the usual C-clamps, and shows options like the regular drill press vice and a heavy-duty version that even provides a workpiece tilting mechanism, and points out small niceties like the V-grooves on the clamps helping work with round stock. For larger pieces, he recommends an underappreciated option — woodworkers’ wooden handscrew clamps, which pair surprisingly well with a drill press. Then, he talks about the hold-down drill press clamps, a favourite of his, especially when it comes to flat sheets of stock like sheet metal or plastic.

As a bonus for those of us dealing with round stock, he shows a V-block he’s made for drilling into its side, and round stock clamp, made by carefully drilling a pair of wooden hand screw clamps, for when you need to drill into a dowel from its top. The ten-minute video is a must watch for anyone not up to speed on their drill press piece fastening knowledge, and helps you improve your drilling game without having skin in it.

We’ve covered a few ingenious and unconventional drill piece fastening options before, from this wise held down by repurposed bicycle quick-release parts, to an electromagnetic wise that left our readers with mixed opinions.

Continue reading “Drill Press Piece Fastening 101” →

Anti-Curl Sandpaper Storage Is Impressive

February 15, 2022 by 15 Comments

Maybe it’s the humidity, maybe it’s the cold weather. Something is making [Laura Kampf]’s nice fabric-backed sandpaper curl up into scrolls the second it comes out of the package. So you can understand why she urgently wanted to make a storage system that would be easy to flip through like a record bin, but also provide enough pressure to keep the papers flat.

Although [Laura] didn’t know what exactly the end result would be, she got started on it anyway — that’s a great way to get more projects off the drawing board and past the finish line. It worked out, because she got a great idea while building the box and using nice cam clamps to hold the finger joints together as the glue dried. Since she already had a bunch of these cam clamps in different lengths lying around, why not use a couple of them for this?

[Laura] has two major classifications of sandpaper — paper-backed and fabric-backed — and built them separate boxen using two clamps for each box. She joined the pins with a DIY handle in order to move the cams in unison, so all she has to do is pull out to flip through the papers, and push the handle back and down to re-pressurize the stack for storage. Be sure to check out the build and demo video after the break.

While DIY clamps are often wood and metal affairs, it’s good to have 3D printing in your corner.

Continue reading “Anti-Curl Sandpaper Storage Is Impressive” →