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My friend Kevin and I made a run of clamps. We used some scrap hard maple and bought some aluminum bars and spring pins. The CNC was used for the center part and the rest was done with a table saw (with sled), band saw, and drill press. Took a little longer than we thought it would, but we tested each one and made sure they worked good.

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Steve Sollod (pronounced sorta like "Solid")
www.swiftcreekguitars.com

I like it!

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

Those are nice! I'm lazy, I just bought 6 more cam clamps

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Yeah that's pretty sweet. Curious to know how much money you saved? I find that the typical ones are either too long or too short for gluing a bridge down.

Are you selling any?

I made a huge run of them out of red oak about 20 yrs ago from an article in Fine woodworking. I used a TS . BS and drill Press. and leftover scraps. light duty only. Now I buy comm ones if needed. I also made a large run of SP luthier clamps using an 18mm tap and wood thread die set. any hard scrap woods e, g. birch will do

Funny, I am making a run of clamps too. Making 50 of them which will go completely around a guitar. Mine are a stack of three layers of 1/4" baltic birch ply.

The hardware for 20 clamps was about $20, but the maple was waiting to be used for something. The beauty of making them yourself is that you can make them any size you want...

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Steve Sollod (pronounced sorta like "Solid")
www.swiftcreekguitars.com

If I had bought 50 clamps it would have set me back a grand. My materials were about $130 and labor is probably 40 hours. At 2 bucks an hour I come out way ahead.

Hi barry . I came to the same $2 conclusion . therefore I buy them now LOL

A word of caution. When my daughter opened her repair shop 4 years ago we made a batch of 25 and decided to make most in the conventional size and a few in different sizes.

We made some with a long enough bar that it fit diagonally across a "D" size body, but the bar is so long that it flexes enough that it is hard to get enough pressure. We made a couple that had much longer/deeper jaws, and as you can see in the shot we made the bar from a bigger piece of aluminum stock from the hardware store. On this size, it is the wooden jaw that flexes a little.

So we should have put the bigger bar on the longer ones, and made the wooden jaw on the deeper ones a little bigger. On both sizes we played with the location of the pivot to get optimal pressure.

To keep the jaw from falling off the bottom of the bar, we drilled a hole, clipped off a short length of copper wire (12 gauge house wiring?) and peened both ends to make a round headed rivet on both sides of the bar. Worked great.

Ed

For those who would rather buy. Good USA made can clamps at a reasonable price. Harry Epstein Co.

https://www.harryepstein.com/index.php/ ... clamp.html

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"