Pipe Clamp Buying Advice

Ubiquitous pipe clamp. These have been in woodworking shops, man, since forever. And what a handy tool to have to do an edge to edge glue up or a face to face glue up. Plenty of force available here, and pipe clamp, so the head is what you're gonna buy, along with the tail end. And then you can mount that to either 1/2 inch pipe, that's the scale that would go with this set, or 3/4 inch pipe like the units I have here. Couple things going on. This would be what's called a traditional style of pipe clamp. And one of the things that's cool about this is it has lifted the pipe up off the deck, off my work bench a little bit more. So it's easier to work around this when I'm manipulating a lot of parts and I have an occasion where I need to get my fingers under this. Getting your fingers squished by a pipe clamp is not a good thing. On the H style, similar, but the spread on this base is a little bit bigger. It's also a little bit higher off the bench. So I've got really good stability here. A little bit more room. Where we're going with all of this is looking at pipe clamps the same way you would look at any tool in your shop to match the clamp you're getting to the job that you wanna do. So again, we've got additional clearance here. In both cases, they come with pads. And I really like that a lot. We wanna have pads on the clamps so that you don't marr the work as you're putting pressure on. And having those come with the clamp rather than me have to make it in the shop is great. The quick acting handle is a wonderful thing. And in this case, on this clamp, it actually has a nut on the end. And you could use that with a nut driver for rapid advance. It's not to put on additional clamp pressure, but it's to do rapid advance of that thread so that you can get to your clamping action more quickly. Now, this one, if we look at this side by side with the others, you can see that my clamp pressure is a distinct round pad instead of a big square pad, and it's further removed from the pipe. So this is a deeper throated clamp. It's gonna give you more reach this way. And this is something I would use if I were doing a face to face glue up in order to make a turning blank. If I were veneering pieces and I needed to put pressure on with a caul, I would probably use a clamp more like this than like this. So in the pipe clamp family, lots of choices. And again, we can go 1/2 inch pipe, 3/4 inch pipe, and then we can also within the family have different products available, different tools available to match to what it is you wanna do. Commonly used for edge to edge glue ups. Either of these clamps, the traditional style or the H style, would be excellent choices for edge to edge glue ups, meaning you're making a tabletop or something like that by gluing boards edge to edge in your shop. Very, very good products to look at, very useful to have in the shop.