Making Dovetail Table Clamps

I love watching shapers run. It’s been 47 years since I ran one. Very nice!

Showing the angle set in use gained you a subscriber. Well done!

What more could a guy want on a Sunday morning, nice big slice of toast with black currant jam and watching Jon’s refurbed shaper in action, smashing nice innovative idea Jon, just a thought you could also make some copper soft jaws for these clamps,, yet another project for old Tel👴🏻👍

I have no idea what you are doing, but you are funny and I will watch more videos and find out what you are doing. 😋

Yours is the first surface grinder that I've seen rotate the wheel in that direction.

Great video. I enjoyed all the steps and how clearly you explained everything.

Nice job yet again. We shared this video on our homemade tools forum this week 😎

Very nice clamps, particularly for holding longer parts on the mill. But dang, I wanted to see the dovetails done on the shaper! Classic use case, better finish. Your parts came off so clean! Wish I had one of those beauties. Shaping is such a primal, yet very controlled operation. Also super happy seeing your angle pin plate prove its worth. I've seen related designs (e.g. Joe Pieczynski), but the genius of yours is having it act as a vise jaw. I like your discovery of the built-in stop function. Simple things like that show off the fundamental solidity of your idea. I once used my lathe as a "shaper" to rough out a camelback straight edge blank. Painfully slow, but very little left to scrape flat - a precision operation limited to the accuracy of the ways and their rigidity. I then used it to scrape the cross slide on the same lathe, cleaned up nearly two thou of error from the factory. As Gotteswinter said, "consider these machines a kit of parts". I've three-plate ground my own optical flats to 1/10 wave (50 nm, 2 uinches) which I used as a repeat-o-meter to bump my cheap surface plate to AA. So rewarding to use primal methods to bootstrap the machines to essentially arbitrary precision. I had mentioned in your pin plate video I was thinking of how to achieve sine plate variability with your design. My ideas all sacrificed some area of the jaw face character, which is not good. Then duh, make the bottom of your plate a sine bar. The sine plate feature would be against the vise jaw, the part-side would include an apron that covers the sine dowels, and your peg holes would be arranged to miss the cutouts around them. Could also eliminate some of the smaller angle incremental peg holes, keep the most useful angles, and now one can etch labels for them since there are fewer options that otherwise crowd the space. Thanks for sharing your inspiring designs! Of course, now I have yet another project on my list of projects that never leave the shop... Cheers!

Thanks for sharing 👍 enjoyed watching the shaper.

Nice build Jon, Should be handy clamping option.. Nice use of the angleset block 👍👍 Cheers......

Fantastic concept. I may make some with brass or aluminum jaws to keep from marking the part. Thanks Jon. It is always a treat watching you build something.

Finally, someone who went my route and made the sliding blocks with an interlocking feature... A 2 piece vise is a great design aswell, but i dont know why are so many people almost obsessed with those eccentric bolt and nut clamps and other such designs... Sure, more simple to do... Lower profile... No specific tools(d.t. cutter) other than what any machinist should have on hand(drills, reamers, boring bars, hhs blanks)... But why the mighty bite style... Its the worst approach to the issue at hand, what with the nature of the mechanism, what with a lot of force being channeled through a small screw and a small t-nut into the slots and so on... With this larger design, one is automatically more inclined to make larger t-nuts, merely to please oneself aesthetically if nothing else... While you are at this project, why dont you make your own sliding gauges or some proper adjustable parallels? Its the same principle, just a bit longer and taller and wider... I also advise the same design for machine feet... Of course, it depends on what do you do, and what do you want, but this sliding block design offers a lot of projects solutions with this one dance sequence... But this is very nice! A beautiful project and nice work!

Morning Jon, fantastic video! What a great pair of clamps, good job! Good to see the angle set in use, awesome tool! Regards Tony

Enjoyed the machining setups, Jon. Your Angleset worked well. Ideal for clamping tapers or odd shapes as well. Nice job. Cheers Tony

A lesson for all homeshopists, even the best of ideas can be improved, take an idea, run with it and make it your own! And my improvement would be perhaps be lifting springs for the moving jaw.

Very nice your angel jig made that job a lot less fiddly 👍👍👍

Thanks! Coppied your dwgs for angleset. Retired sparky with ambitions. teaching myself machining!

Hi Jon, great content. Now I have two more projects. I love your “vintage” wrist watch, I used to have one just like it.

Like those Jon. Thanks for sharing!

Just catching up with your videos Jon. I've watched the Angleset and this one so I will comment on both. The Angleset is a genius idea. Also eminently patentable and would sell like hot cakes, so Kudos to you for making it open source. The clamps are absolutely brilliant too, and making them showed off the incredible versatility of the Angleset. really enjoyed both films.