Great Uses for Trigger Clamps

Being able to use a clamp one-handed and get plenty of oomph on it is a wonderful thing. And trigger clamps like this are a great versatile thing to have in your shop. Another reason that I like having them is they're adaptable. So here's where we're going. In this case, I'm putting a knife together. This is a tang style knife. This is a piece of white tail antler, and I've got a recess in there for the tang to go into. Once this is ready to go, I need to be able to grab the bolster, squeeze the handle, so I can hold all this together while the epoxy is curing. So, adaptable in this case means... To make this work for knife making, I cut a slot and that's gonna allow that to grab the bolster. Simple work to do, makes that into a specialized clamp that I need for just this purpose. And as a little side note, notice on the tang, those D tents that have been ground into it, that just helps make sure that once that's seated in the handle, that's it kind of a barb to help it engage with the epoxy. All right, watch how this works for us. It's really cool. Take advantage of that slot to get around the bolster. Pressure on the handle. And this is nice too, I can advance the clamp with one hand. For this knife, I'm gonna flip this over, that's gonna give me pressure where I want it. There we go. What I was just looking at was making sure the antler and the fiber are seated against the bolster. Boom. Let that rest comfortably until the resin dries. Let's look at some more stuff we can do with these trigger clamps. When you need to cantilever a part off your bench, that's gonna tip if I don't do something about it. A little trigger action there. And a little more trigger action there. Plenty of bite. Solid as a rock. Sometimes with the clamp we wanna squeeze, sometimes with the clamp we wanna spread. This chair's an example. It needs a little bit of glue in one of those joints. What I can do is flip, put that back together, and then we can get inside here. And I like this on furniture disassembly, what this lets me do, rather than rap on this with a mallet, this is a kinder, gentler approach to being able to slowly get that to come apart by just adding a little bit of pressure. A little bit of pressure. If it doesn't quite wanna come, maybe a little tap with the mallet. But this is gonna gently persuade that joint to open up so I can get the glue in there it needs. So then I can squeeze it back closed, and get that chair rock-solid again. When you need a hole drilled in a sphere, a couple steps to this process. First, we need a piece of scrap on the drill press table. And I'm just eyeballing Forstner bit on about the center of that and clamp that in place. Bloop. The diameter of that bit needs to be less than the diameter of the ball. And part of what's really important here is now that we've got that hole punched, don't change your setup. Giving away my secret right there, but I wanna look and make sure when this goes in, I'm gonna clear that sphere. And we're not done with clampicity yet, 'cause this would just be asking that baby to spin. If we do this, we have a handle, and we can better handle the situation. So what makes this work is that this is centered right over the Forstner bit, which means now it's perfectly centered over the sphere. And I successfully hit a hole in one. Big diameter bit, relatively small board, that is asking to turn into a propeller. Instead, we're not gonna let it do that 'cause we're gonna do this. Hands-free. These clamps from Bessey, it's something where honestly, once they're in your shop and you start using them, you're gonna find more and more stuff that they are useful for. And as somebody who works by themselves a lot, the one-handed nature of closing the clamp and the squeeze that they provide, makes them a really useful and worthwhile thing to have around.