Repairing Aluminum Hold Downs
George VondriskaDescription
You check the toolpath. You do an air cut. You eyeball the material location on the CNC machine, You double-check (maybe even triple check) the hold down locations on the material. But, sometimes, despite our best efforts, a router bit manages to “find” one of the aluminum hold downs you’re using. Ouch!! Most of my hold downs have a rubber grippy thing on the end and, after a router bit has found them a few times, the rubber isn’t very effective any more. No sweat, there’s a solution for this problem, and we can redo the grippy thing.
Plasti Dipto the rescue! This stuff is way more rubbery than plastic, and is actually designed to be used to put rubber grips on stuff like pliers. You can use it to add rubber handles to your tools, like your router wrenches. When you’ve clipped your hold downs a few times, and there isn’t enough rubber left on the tip to actually be able to call it a hold down anymore, you can use this stuff to reapply the rubber and make the hold down effective again. You’re back in business.
The Process
When you do this, be sure you follow the instructions on the can. You need to dip at the right rate to get the proper build of rubber. Do three coats or so to get a good thickness of rubber built up.
Shop Tips
Who wants to bang their head against the wall, or reinvent the wheel? The WWGOA Contributing Editors have been doing woodworking a LONG time, and have lots of experience. We’ve grabbed onto that experience and brought it to life, making sure we provide you with more shop tips so you can keep your shop, and your projects, moving forward.
Despite my best efforts, every once in a while on my CNC machine, I manage to misplace an aluminum hold down. Part of what's important there is they're aluminum, not steel, so if a carbide bit hits an aluminum hold down, it doesn't hurt the bit. However, what it does hurt is that this rubber tip on here, at this point, is not very effective anymore. And when I try to hold down with that, it slips all over the place. Let's take care of that. Gonna take care of it with this product. This is amazing stuff. This is, what it's really for is putting rubber handles on something like side cutters or pliers that are metal only, don't have rubber on them. So that's the Plasti Dip part. Why a long time ago, still had a beard, I did a video clip on using this to rubberize the handle on collar wrenches to make them a little easier to grip. We're gonna take advantage of this stuff by dipping our hold downs. Follow the instructions on the can. They do want you to kinda do this at a certain rate, but honestly, you can't mess it up. I'm gonna go into the dipping sauce, stay down in there for a little bit. The coating is available in a bunch of different colors: black, red, yellow, blue, just in case, for some reason, you wanted to add some color to your hold downs or for some reason having them color-coded was a benefit. This is first coat. I'm gonna let that sit. I'm gonna go ahead and hit this one while we got the can open. And then what I have found is that you want to get a couple layers on here. So check the instructions on the can. And once that's dry, come back and dip again. I've got three layers on here with the appropriate drying time between each layer. This is one that I fixed, I don't know, a month ago or so, month or more ago. And you can see I'm obviously using it on a regular basis and that new rubberized coating is holding up really well. So this is a great way to rejuvenate those rubberized tips on any of your hold downs when your router bit gets just a little bit too close to the hold down.
George, i use the plasti-dip on my f-style clamps. When doing glue-ups, I have a habit of scraping my arms across the ends of the clamps and at times have had some nasty scratches from them. This eliminated that. Now if you can tell me how to preserve the remainder of the dip in the can after opening. Thanks for the videos.