How to Use a Drill Press as a Clamp

I'm working on a big platter here that I wanna turn on the lave. And the next step I need to do, now that it's cut round, is to use a dummy board and a paper joint on the back so that I can put a face plate on this and then separate it later. That's the real benefit to the paper joint. The problem I'm up against is that when I go to glue this in the center, this platter is so large, it's gonna be very difficult for me to reach with clamps from the outside in order to get good pressure on this dummy board and make sure I have a good glue joint. So, instead, this is really cool. I'm going to do all this with my drill press. So, first let me get the glue on here. Then we'll come back and I'll show you just how we can get down pressure from the drill press in order to hold everything together. A paper joint is a great thing to know about if you're going to do bowl turning or a platter like this because it lets us use a face plate, but separate it later. With a paper joint, you want glue on both surfaces. The dummy board and the platter. It's very important that the paper is porous. You don't wanna use like a shiny magazine page because the glue has to be able to soak into it in order to hold everything together. Now, the hole in here is leftover from my circle-cutting jig. So, there's a quarter inch hole in the back of this. Just a tiny, just barely in there. Just enough so I could spin that thing on my circle-cutter. And there's a quarter inch hole in the dummy board. This one goes all the way through. So now I can press a dowel through there, also through the paper, that dowel will then seat in the hole in my blank. Now here on my drill press I've got that chuck as open as it can be. So that dowel is just gonna end up up inside the chuck. So, now I can just advance the quill down. I've got the table securely locked against the column. I can get pressure on this. Look at that squeeze out pop out. Getting great clamp pressure on that. The important thing is I don't want to stand here and hold this overnight. So, I've gotta lock the quill in a downward position. On this particular machine that's done with this little neuro nut. There we go. Great way to get real uniform clamping pressure in the center of a big object like this without having to reach in with deep throat clamps.