I’ve been experimenting a lot recently with making furniture out of MGP10 structural pine that I machine myself. The first few examples have been work stands for things like my Tormek in the garage. One of the things I need to do when making these stands is to turn a series of machined pine strips into panels. That’s where bar clamps come in handy. I recently discovered where to buy good quality clamps cheaply, and thought I’d share…
The idea to machine pine into useful furniture wood comes from Jay Bates’ YouTube channel. He makes really cool blanket boxes out of structural pine for example. However, it wasn’t really possible until I picked up a cheap second hand thicknesser, but that’s a story for another day.
That said, you need bar clamps if you’re going to laminate strips of wood into something more useful. I’ve been using a lot of Irwin clamps, but you couldn’t call them cheap at $60 per clamp for the big ones.
Then I found these 650mm Bessey clamps at Masters. Sure, the other ones I’ve been using are twice the length, but the number of panels I need to do that are a meter wide is basically zero. These clamps are half the price and Bessey make really high quality clamps. For some reason the 650mm clamps are cheaper than all the other options I can find, and they’re a good size for the panels I want to make.
So, just a random pointer to a good deal. I hope it helps someone else as well.