Benefits of Parallel Jaw Clamps

I've been using parallel jaw clamps in my shop for, man, a really long time. And in fact, at a time when all I had was two clamps, two parallel jaw clamps, I could be doing a kitchen full of doors, which is a lot of doors and I'd glue them up one door at a time so that I could put them in the parallel jaw clamps. I had a boatload of other clamps but I didn't trust them for doors. Here's what we've got going here. Parallel jaws, it's just what the name sounds like which is when we bring these jaws in they remain parallel to each other. One of the things you might've found in your clamping experience, there's that in some cases as you tighten the clamp, the jaws cant, and as they cant, that'll introduce a bow to your work. And especially in the case of a door and really any kind of flat glue up we're doing whether it's a door or a tabletop, if we introduce a bow, it's going to be impossible to get rid of that once the glue is dry. So with that parallel jaw, we help keep that panel nice and flat. That is the primary drive for me, that gets me to a point where, especially on stuff like doors, I want to make sure they're clamped up in those parallel jaws. Now, in addition to the clamps which are already wonderful items to have we can add some other stuff. So in this case, the way I glued up that door was I had these cribs below the clamp and that allows me to run clamps long ways so I can draw the rails flush with the stiles and at the same time run clamps in the opposite direction so I can close the cope and stile joint up against the rails. In addition to accessories, like I've been looking at here, lots of other stuff that we can add to these clamps that are pretty cool and worth having a look at. One cool accessory I like are these standoff blocks and I've already got them under the other board. So when everything is in clamps here that's going to hold me off the beam, one of the benefits I gain from that is I can easily get throughout the glue seam there to get my drips off before it dries. I'm going to glue my stock up and then we'll get some other clamp tips going for you here. Okay, another thing that's cool is instead of the narrow pad that's on here, great for doors, if we want to broaden the applied pressure on a big panel glue up like this, can swap that out to a bigger pad. And I'm just going to get snug here and then I'm going to show you a very handy tip on long glue ups like this, and that is take another clamp and bridge the seam. And what that's going to do is level up those boards for me, save me a lot of squeezing with my fingers. All right, then we can close. And you know, like I said, parallel jaw clamps, one of the great gains we get out of there is how effective they are at keeping panels like this nice and flat so when the glue is dry, we don't have a big flattening process to go through. I'm gonna take this guy off the bench. Let's look at a couple of other things. Sometimes with a clamp, we want to not squeeze, we want to spread, so disassembly of furniture that you're gonna repair is an example of that. And it's handy then to be able to slide off and then slide back on and then I can go pad to pad and apply pressure outward instead of inward. And another cool way to take advantage of that is you ever run into a scenario where my project is this big but my clamp is this big. So if we can pair them up and gain mileage and not have to run to the store and buy an extra long clamp, that's a good thing. There we go. Two short clamps just became one really long clamp. So a lot of great advantages, good things to understand about parallel jaw clamps and the benefits and gains that they can bring to your shop when you're doing glue ups.