Product Spotlight: Bessey Clamps

Let me tell you a little bit about parallel jaw clamps. Many years ago, like 20 years ago, when I first opened my shop, I had one pair of parallel jaw clamps. And when a job would come in that required gluing up many, many, many doors. I had other clamps, but I would glue things up one at a time because it was important to me to do the glue ups and the parallel jaw clamps because those clamps made my life that much easier. Here's the thing with parallel jaw clamps. Much like the name says, the jaws are gonna stay parallel to each other. So when we look at a parallel jaw clamp, one of the things you might've experienced with other styles of clamps is that when we get pressure on them the jaws can have a tendency to can't out. And if that causes your work to bow while you're gluing it up, you're gonna introduce a bow to your work that you may never get out. So one of the things we automatically get from parallel jaws is the jaws stay parallel. So your work stays flatter. Now here's the thing. You look at something like a clamp and say, all right, it's a clamp, it squeezes. How far can we go with this technology? Well, honestly, Bessey's done a really good job with thinking outside of the box and coming up with lots of ways that we can advance this technology. This is just a cool opportunity to look at a simple thing in your shop, a clamp. But talk about the cool stuff that we can do with these Bessey clamps. They just really did a nice job. They, spent a lot of time thinking about this. So one, parallel jaw, we've talked about that. With the jaws, what's neat is this comes off and it's a flexible material. So if I'm doing a glue up where glue drips on this or squeezes out and gets on this, don't mess with it, let it dry. After the glue is dry, you can slide this off. Like I just did flex it a little bit. And of course at that point the glue is gonna be rigid because it's hard. This is flexible, so when I flex it, the glue is gonna pop off of there. And that thing is clean again. And of course, if anything happens to it, we can slide that off and replace it. On a lot of parallel jaw clamps. You find that one jaws moveable. And of course we need that so we can adjust it for size and then the other jaws fixed. So another cool thing they did here is they made it so that with the push of a button, the fixed jaw also can be moved. So what I like about that is I get into scenarios on my bench, where if it's a longer clamp if this was in a fixed position, and this is here. I have so much bar sticking out this way that it gets hard to work with. So with this, what we can actually do is you could keep everything balanced by always working in the center of the bar, which is gonna make it easier to work with. While we're looking at this being opened up like this, let's talk about these guys. This is another one of these kinds of like doy moments. Like why didn't I think of that? These which come with the clamps go like this. And I bet you're already have figured out why that's a good thing. What those will do is keep your glue up, floating above the bar. So how many times have you had it, where you get a little bit of squeeze out, then the squeeze out because your wood is sitting in your material is sitting right on the clamp bar. The squeeze out is getting down there and then you're getting weird things that telegraph up into your work. What this will do is keep your stock off of the bar. And if two isn't enough, you can get more of these from Bessey so that you can build this up some more. You can have more of these spacers available. Then while we have this guy here, let's look at this. Gonna pop these guys off, gonna pop this end off. As pretty commonly, I don't know a lot of the time we're thinking about squeezing with a clamp but I've done a lot of furniture repair. And when you take things apart, you don't really wanna pound on it. What you'd like to do is slowly open those parts up so you can gently get them apart. So here we're ready to glue up a door or a cutting board or whatever it is. But if we do this. And then remembering, that's moveable. Now using these two jaws, we can advance this and spread and we could do what I just did. Remember we took that off or because this jaws double faced we could simply turn this one around and put it back on and have a spreader. It's another, it just is gonna do a good job of optimizing what you can do with these clamps in your shop. Cause not only can we squeeze but we can also spread. So now let's look at what's this big thing doing here . And for that pop that off. You look at your clamp collection and say, well, boy. It's possible every once in a while I'm gonna need big, long clamps but not every time I'm in my shop. So another way to work around that. Would be. Use one of these. And what I've just done is made my two short clamps Into one really long clamp. So, you know, same concept really is like as turning them from a squeezer to a spreader is getting one of these. I can turn my short clamps into a long clamp, really long clamp to , again further optimize what these clamps are capable of in my shot. Now how about these guys? Remember that that pad comes off so we can slide that off of the head. Slide this on and it's dovetailed on it's dovetailed. So once that's on there, it's not gonna come off this way. It has to be slid on from the top. So it's gonna stay engaged and it can stay in any vertical position on there that you want. And I'm doing this, what's the big deal. Well, this will go 15 degrees in either direction. So if you're putting something together that has a taper to it, rather than make a tapered call to compensate for the angle in your part this is gonna accommodate that tape or for you. And you could do one on this end. You could do one on both ends depending on what your needs are. The other thing out of this is that it also is gonna spread this pressure over a bigger area. So if I were doing a big tabletop like I'm pointing at my work bench here if I were doing a big edge to edge glue up on a tabletop I'd wanna put these on so that I'm spreading that clamp pressure over a bigger area. Getting a bigger cone of pressure. That's what comes off of these clamps to make sure I have more uniform pressure on the wood so that it, the glue up goes better. So that's a cool accessory as well. These blacks, let me use the parallel jaws and configure them into a, maybe like a gluing station is a good way to think of this. So the way it works is it's kind of a castle turret. The slots on this side go all the way to the bottom. The slots on this side, go partway down. What that lets me do then is that clamp is gonna sit down there. The clamp I put in the other direction. and I run on a real estate, sits above it. So if you're putting something together that requires pressure in both directions we don't have these clamps arguing with each other now about who gets priority because that block is gonna automatically hold them off the table for you. So that they're gonna be configured right. So it just makes that whole process a whole lot easier to do. Another thing that I like is on the handles. I am so glad that we're away from the standard wooden handles. These grips are so much easier to grab onto than just a piece of painted or stained wood. So that automatically makes it easier to loosen and tighten the clamps. If you've got any kind of hand grip, hand pressure issues. They've also built in a screw there that'll take a six millimeter wrench so we could do this. So if that's not quite enough. You can add a little torque or crack them loose by popping an Allen wrench in there. Last thing that's have a look at there's another feature on these that we should talk about. Let me get a clamp ready. I'm gonna come over there. Cause the other thing we can do, if you're, again, setting up a clamping station of any kind, notice that these also have a hole in the bottom and the hole is designed to accept this clamp. So I can secure this to my bench and make sure that it's not running away from me while I'm trying to do a complicated glue up. So net, net, it's neat to see the thought that Bessey has put into making what seems like a low tech simple device, a clamp into something that really offers a lot of capabilities so that the Bessey REVO Clamps are definitely worth a look and a check them out and I think like me, you're gonna like having these in your shop.