Hi, Folks.
At the insistence of my friend Tom, I’m taking a few days off of the boat build to host a group for the 4th of July at my parents’ house near Lake Tahoe. This actually represents an unexpectedly welcome opportunity for my body to recover a bit. The staple pulling, combined with the contortionist maneuvers often necessitated by the close confines of the space in which we’re building the boat, have me feeling pretty beat up right now. I think I hit my head three times on the very sharp, very square edge of the platen on my Burr King sander in the past three days. At least it didn’t draw blood.
As I sit here overlooking the lake, I’m poking around at the various photos of the build I have on my laptop. This one caught my attention.
What you see there is a small fraction of the number of clamps you need to build a boat. And you really need them in all different sizes and shapes. C-clamps. Bar clamps. Spring clamps. Large. Small. It’s daunting. My neighbor Chris used to work at a boatyard building big fishing boats and says they had shopping carts full of the things.
Anyway, clamps are freaking expensive. A good 12″ bar clamp from the likes of Jorgensen runs about $15. Bigger clamps cost more. And C-clamps are comparable. This isn’t that bad if you’re buying 4 or 8 of them for occasional wood working projects. When you need 100 of them to build a boat it’s a different story. Especially if you’re not in the boat-building business and don’t have an ongoing need for a shopping cart full of them.
I ended up buying 40 12″ clamps from Harbor Freight for $3.99 each. This is nowhere near enough, but I was skeptical about them and figured I’d limit my risk by starting “small.” Fortunately my friend Wolfgang filled in the gap during the clamp-intensive part of the project with a giant pile of loaners, many of which are in the photo above.
Anyway, I was right to be skeptical. These HF units are pretty much single-use. I’ll build the boat with them, but they don’t have much of a future beyond that because they’re falling apart. And what’s frustrating is that the fundamental flaw with them is so easy to remedy. The connection between the grip you turn to tighten the clamp and the screw turned by the grip is ridiculous. They just barely knurled the end of the screw shaft and pressed it into a plastic grip. Torque it tightly and the grip starts spinning on the screw shaft, and once that happens it never really gets tight again. There are a dozen ways they could have created that junction in a more robust manner that would still have allowed them to sell a $3.99 clamp. They just didn’t bother to think it through.
Sure, the plastic pads would still be cheap, the bar would be a bit flimsy and the castings would be rough, but it would do what it’s advertised to do: Clamp.
What I have now is a pile of soon-to-be-trash that really didn’t need to be. I generally buy quality tools, and this reminds me why. But for the life of me I don’t understand why cheap stuff can’t at least be thoughtfully engineered within the confines of its cost envelope. Sigh…
-Ben
PS – If you know a source for affordable clamps (either bar or c-clamps) that represent a good value, I’m all ears.