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I was able to get go from no ham knowledge to Amateur Extra in Under 2 months. That can seem daunting, and impossible. However, it really isn’t.

In this episode I walk you through how to move up in your licenses quickly. I go through what I did, how I did it, and mistakes I made along the way.

Overall I am glad I was able to get my license, but there are a number of things that could have gone better. I hope I am able to articulate many of them to help other people out.

Maybe even see a few more people on the waves, literally Fast Scan FTW!!!

• Ham Radio 2.0 – Technician
• Ham Radio 2.0 – General
• Fast Track Ham – Technician Book
• Fast Track Ham – General Book
• Fast Track Ham – Amateur Extra Book
• Fast Track Ham Website
• HamStudy
• Anki (SRS)

Ham radio is not a dying technology. On the contrary it is growing, and I am totally fascinated by it.

I used to think Ham radio was just one thing, and was even convinced by some for a while that it was going to die. However, that has all changed recently.

I decided to start learning about Ham radio almost on a whim, and it has been a super awesome experience that has expanded my understanding of the world. There were things I just did not understand about wireless tech that now make a lot of sense.

In this episode I walk through some of the cool things about ham radio that I have learned over the last couple of months. I think these are all things that will lead to a lot of fun in the future.

Trying to learn a lot of new things, and get better at them, can lead to an abundance of projects. It seems like there is always one or two ready ago as soon as one is done.

Today I talk about 5 projects and where they currently stand, what has gone right, wrong, what I have learned from them, and what are the next steps. Even a little bit on why.

Have you ever wanted to get organized, but think “Oh I’ll find the perfect way to track my todos”. Only to never find the right thing, and to never get organized.

In this episode I talk about it from my perspective, and tell you what I do when I get into these situations. Hopefully there is a morsel of advice that can help you when you are hit by this.

I also talk briefly about a new service I am uploading my videos to as an alternative to YouTube.

We all have things to do, and a short amount of time to do it. I have always been able to do a large amount of things.

I feel like one of the main reasons for doing a lot is I treat everything as a project. I goal set, plan and execute as if every aspect of my life is a project that needs to be Project Managed.

In this episode I walk a bit through my process and use 1.5 examples to illustrate it better.

I recently hired a Permaculture Design Consultant to do an assessment of my property. We spent several hours walking over the property, discussing it, and coming up with ideas about it.

In the end we made some good decisions, and I have away froward.

But was it worth the price? Was it worth the time spent doing it? And did I learn anything along the way which is part of the reason I am doing any of this?

Hard times they are a coming. I have seen many people deny this, but if you pay attention to what is going on. You can see things are about to get real.

In this episode I break down a few indicators I have heard about, read, and piece together myself. It paints a bit of a bleak picture of the future for the next couple of years.

However, knowing that something is coming helps us to prepare. So at the end I give my suggestions on things to do to make it through to the other side that are a bit different than most people may come up with.

I think they are good suggestions to do not only for the coming times, but in good times as well.

Permaculture is quite involved, and super fascinating. The lazy side and science side of me both really like it.

In this episode I talk a little about what permaculture is, and why I am learning more about it. Along with some of the goals with permaculture.

Hopefully by the end of this episode it might spark more interest in doing more with it.

In the middle of summer in Oklahoma the weather is hoooooot. A/C makes life a bit more bearable at 4 in the afternoon. I was fortunate to get to help my dad install an A/C unit in his shop this past weekend. It was a beast at the 36k model of the Mr. Cool DIY Mini Split.

This episode I talk a bit about the ups and downs of it, as well as what I think of the A/C installation process. And I give a super important note about receiving your unit if you are having it shipped to your house.

If you prefer to watch

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the 31st episode of the BudDIY Podcast. I’m your host, Buddy Lindsey, and today we’re going to talk about my experience installing a 36k unit of the MRCOOL DIY Mini Split in my dad’s shop. But before that, if you haven’t visited the website in a while, feel free to do so at BudDIY.net and feel free to sign up for the email newsletter. If you are watching on YouTube, feel free to hit subscribe and hit that notification bell so you know when new episodes are released. And if you prefer podcasts, then we are available on most major platforms. Go ahead and give us a subscribe over there.

On that, let’s jump into the episode and what is going on around here. Well, this week I made a good amount of progress on my bookshelf that I’ve been doing for the weekend woodworker course. It was definitely a little bit interesting because I made the 10 foot pipe clamps I talked about last week, and I got everything glued up this week. I’m doing some of the cuts for that back panel. The back panel was definitely an interesting experience. Glad it’s going to be facing the back of a thing, because they’re a little wonky in a couple of spots.

But I got it done, and actually learned a couple things along the way, and remembered a couple of things that I should have done. And one of those being, this week, is use my bow products guide feather board. I forgot about it for the first couple of cuts and was doing some really odd things to help hold the wood securely while keeping my hand plenty away from the blade, which I now cut with the blade guard on, so I never even got my hand close to the blade guard. Definitely a lot more cognizant of where my hands are, for sure.

But after a few cuts, I remembered using the bow products feather board that I got to hold everything there, and it just ran the wood through, these are 80 inch long pieces of wood, and it cut magnificently, and a lot better cut from what I was trying to do earlier. So I need to remember to use that thing more than I did.

Yeah. I’m hoping to actually finish the bookshelf this week, if not staining it and finishing it, the very least all the construction parts. There’s a few things that I don’t need to do, since it’s going to be an 80 inch tall, or actually a little taller than that, bookshelf, specifically some of the very, very top stuff I don’t need to do because I don’t know too many people that will be able to see the top of it like it was originally designed to do, so I can just do some of the fancy stuff on the outside from looking up. So that’ll save a little bit of time and frustration.

Along with the land of unintended consequences of changing the design of something, I ran out of clamps when I was clamping up the front frames along the sides. And so I was only able to do one at a time, so it took me a lot of extra time. On that, if I only had two more clamps available, it would’ve worked out perfectly, so I went ahead and ordered those two clamps and got those in, and now hopefully if I do something like that again, I won’t run out of clamps, but I’m sure I’ll glue something up at some point and I’ll run out of clamps again. We will see.

But yeah, all I’ve got to do left is put one more frame piece on and build the shelves, screw the holes in for the shelves, and then do some kind of, not crown molding, that’s the only thing I can think of, around the top, and I’m ready to finish.

So I’m just excited, I’m making great progress again. And then I am ready to jump onto the next thing, and that is to set up my drill press that came in, and to tune in my jointer, finally, because the next woodworking project I have is the wall cabinet from the weekend woodworker course, which is the very last one. And since I have a nice piece of rough sawn, or I guess actually it’s S3 Walnut, sitting next to me on the ground, I have to figure out my jointer and my planer and get everything dialed in so I can get just the size of wood that I want to do for that.

So on that let’s jump into the main segment of today, and that is my experience installing the MRCOOL DIY Mini Split system. And let me tell you, it is awesome. It is super simple, and if knowing what I know now, if everything was ready to go, I could probably install one in a little over an hour. That’s how simple they are, and that’s how awesome that the MRCOOL people did at getting this thing engineer.

Now for me, it took us an entire day to get it done, and I want to go through why. So the first thing is the unit comes in two separate boxes. One comes with the main inside unit, and the other with the main outside unit. And the first thing is you open up the inside unit, and you start reading the instructions, and it gives you everything you need. So I kind of read through the instructions, I walked through everything, and I realized the instructions, before having me move on to the outside unit, had one piece that I had to do close to the very end, and that piece wasn’t in the box.

And so I’m like, great, where could this thing be? I thought maybe I dropped this, so I was walking all over the shop, looking for it, and I just could not find it. And my brain was just stuck on the fact that it’s got to be in this box since it’s the entirety of the inside unit, and this is part of the inside unit.

Well, finally we were just like, I don’t know what else to do. Let’s just go open up the other box and see if it’s in there. And low and behold, it was in the big box with the outside unit. So that was a little bit frustrating, and that wasted some of our time to do the install. And that piece was the piece that you shove in the hole before you put the unit on, so that it has something nice to go through to the outside and protect from the installation and other stuff in the wall itself. And this actual little piece caused us a little problem that I’ll get to here in a minute.

But yeah, once we found that, we fully went ahead and unboxed the outside unit and took a look at it. And this is where I want to kind of give you all some advice, or an idea, or a tip, is whenever your people come to drop it off and you actually receive it, before your shipping people leave, pop open the big box of the big main unit and look at it to see if there’s any damage. While this thing worked, man, somebody had to have dropped this unit somewhere along the line because it had dents in a bunch of different places, almost couldn’t get the top off to be able to try to undented in a couple of spaces.

But we didn’t open it until three days after my dad had received it, and so it’s not like he could reject shipping at that point, because he’d been sitting on it for a couple of days for me to come up and help put it together. Because this is the big unit. This is a big, big unit. And I don’t know that either one of us could have done it by ourselves without hurting ourselves. So definitely open the box, take a look so you can reject shipment if it is damaged. But I do want to reiterate on that point, it did still work.

So after that, we just followed the instructions like we were supposed to. We pulled the back plate off and took the little cardboard insert. Wind it up on the wall where we knew studs were going to be. Used a little punch through the cardboard, and that’s where the screws were going to go. Screwed in the plate that was there for it. With this, though, we did a lot of double checking, and we did a lot of… we literally hung the cardboard on the wall and put a level on it, and then punched every hole, and then punched where the hole that we needed to drill through the wall went. And then we took that down and then we hung the plate itself that’s going to support the inside unit on the wall, and double checked all those little holes that we had punched earlier, were in the exact same place they were supposed to be. They were, and so we were good to go.

And then after that, on the cardboard diagram, they actually give you measurements of distances of different things. And I went ahead and jumped up there with a tape measure and double checked all the distances from different holes were in the same spot, especially where we have to drill the hole to run the lines through to the outside. Might have gone a little overboard, but I did it just to be doubly sure that everything was going to go correctly, because I didn’t want a line to be kinked in the wrong place, or at all, and I want it so that it would work properly.

So after that, we were ready to actually put the inside unit up on the wall. So we took it, we lifted it up on the back, and we bent out all of the lines, so they were kind of pointing straight out from the unit. And then we went and shoved the insert that goes into the outside, into whole… double checked on the outside where the end of it was, so that we knew what to cut off. We cut off the excess of that pipe that we shoved through the hole, put it back into the hole. And then we pushed the unit, the cabling, the Freon cables, through the hole.

And then I went to go set it on the bracket, which that would normally go super duper easy, except we actually put the little pipe that goes through the hole in the wall, on wrong. And it’s like, what the heck? How do you put that on wrong? And, well, there is this thing where it’s fully round, except there’s a top edge cut off of the pipe, and we’re like, why is that cut off there? It’s not in the instructions why it’s there, it’s not in the instructions what way to put that pipe, so we were like, well, maybe since it needs to be at a downward angle, it’s so that it doesn’t bend the plastic very much, which was like, okay, whatever, didn’t think it was going to be that big of a deal, so we put it up there.

But when we put the actual unit on the wall, there’s a little piece of that pipe sticking down below the unit, and so it wasn’t a flush fit to the wall. And we’re like, oh. So if you go to put your own in, make sure that pipe that has a cutoff flange end on it, make sure that’s down so you actually have a flush fit to the wall.

And in actually telling you all that, I realized I missed a step, and that is the actual drilling the hole through the wall. So we needed a three and a half inch hole saw, and this thing actually went pretty good. We got a really long bit, I don’t know, I think it was probably like two feet long, and we drilled straight through. Just straight through the wall, because we kind of wanted to make sure we got a precise amount, or a precise angle, because in the instructions that you need to go kind of downward, like 0.2 inches from where the hole is, down.

And so we just were like, Hey, let’s drill a hole straight through, and then on the other side we can drill a hole with a hole saw straight through that part of the wall, except 0.2 inches down. Great in theory. So we cut out the hole on each side, pulled out the little excess insulation that was there, and then tried to shove the pipe through at a downward angle, and it didn’t fit. We’re like, what the heck? And so I finally realized, well, maybe there’s too much tension in there, because we have straight holes instead of angled holes. So we went through and did angled holes on the inside, and an angled hole on the outside, and boom, we got it, and it slid in there pretty well. So that was a good success. Glad we did that.

So then we just kept going, and we put the unit on the wall, and then finally we had the stuff sticking out the wall, and it was there and everything was working great. And now we’re actually ready to do the outside. The platform that we put it on, I will let you find out more about that, and what all we did for that in the YouTube video that I’m going to do at the install, because it’s basically a concrete platform that my dad made. They did a couple specific things that were interesting, but it’s better to show you than be able to try to explain it on a podcast. So definitely look out for that video in the next couple of weeks.

But anyways, so let’s actually get to the main unit itself. The thing is heavy and big. I mean it’s over my waist high, and so my dad and I both picked it up and put it on the concrete platform that we had. And then we went ahead and anchored it in place. And then it came time to actually start connecting up the lines. So what we had to do is we had to push the Freon lines, these are copper lines, against the wall, kind of come down, and we had to be really careful to not kink anything in any place.

And so we had it run down, and then we figured out, Hey, how high do we want it off the ground based on where we were going to have the excess coil. Because since these are pre-charged lines, you have extra coil of line, and that needs to be stored somewhere because you can’t just cut it off, because then you have to go hire a professional to come in and do all the vacuuming stuff.

So anyways, so we actually ended up using a hose reel thing to attach to the wall, and then set that extra coil on. So we had to make sure we had the 90 degree from the hole in the wall over to that to be at the right height. Got that all in place, didn’t do a really great job at that turn because my dad’s going to go back later and install a little casing thing around it. We bought one, it was for a different brand, thought it would work. It ended up not being large enough for the size pipes that we had for this thing.

But we got run over, we did some of the taping on it, the lines that we needed, and then we connected the electric cable that runs from the inside unit out to the outside unit. Then we plugged in the Freon lines from the big things, and they work the exact same from the ones coming from the wall to the ones that go into the main unit. And then we just opened everything up to go inside of the main compressor unit, and we’re off to the races. Had an electrician come in and do the final wiring, and we were good to go.

And then we went to fire it up, and it didn’t work. It’s funny because I turned it on and was talking in the video for this thing, “All right, we’re about ready to turn it on for the very first time.” And I clicked the button, and nothing happened. And my dad just started laughing in the background like, well that was a let down. And he’s like, wait a minute, let me flip this breaker. Flipped that breaker and all of a sudden behind me you hear, beep. It’s like really? Really, you just did that to me? And so hit the button again, it came on and started blowing cold air, and you could see the little louvers opening up to the full on air conditioning out.

And then we just stood in front of the air conditioner for probably the next five minutes, because it was in the nineties most of the day, while we were trying to do this outside. And if you’re on the YouTube video, you can see that I have a little bit of a sunburn on the top of my head.

But anyway, it was a great experience. The actual work that we had to do getting that going, I highly recommend this unit if you want to do it yourself. It is super, super, super simple, as long as you have everything prepared. Which really is going to lead me into the last segment of the podcast, and that is the failure. And the failure of the week is not planning. This is my dad’s unit. And so I was going up to assist him, and we were going to record it along the way, but there was not any prep work done other than making sure we had a three and a half inch hole saw. And it really showed. Because what should’ve been a two, two and a half hour job ended up taking about eight hours.

Some of that was because we had the wrong outside casing for the wire for the extra protection. One of those was last minute decided to go ahead and do cement anchors into the pad. And then another was, didn’t have the right wiring for the electrician to wire up. And then electrician went to wire up, and they didn’t have the right connectors to go into it for eight gauge wire, because we had to use eight gauge wire since we had the really big unit. And just a lot of just little bitty things that if it had been fully planned and we had all of the stuff there already, it would have been a lot faster.

I really think, had everything been laid out properly, I really think this thing could have been installed in about an hour. It’s that simple. But we just ran into a lot of little problems. Plus it was 90 degrees, 95 degrees, and when you’re that hot and muggy and sweaty, you’re just like, ah, you can’t think right. We took a bunch of breaks for drink and hydration, and then we had lunch, and then we had dinner. We had to run to the store three times.

Lack of planning really threw a lot of things, whenever you had a combination of everything. So definitely research it out, plan it out, and you’re going to be a lot better off. And watch the video when it comes out, so if you’re ready to do it, you can avoid some of these same mistakes.

Thank you for your time, I thank you for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

Clamps are Clamps, or are they. Before I got into doing Woodworking I never realized all the types of clamps that exist. Especially when things got hard to glue up.

Recently I had an experience where I didn’t have long enough clamps so I made some 10 foot pipe clamps, and called it a day. Then I decided maybe it is time to research better clamping.

In this episode we cover 10 clamps you might use in your DIY work, or woodworking. Several are pretty cool, and can make life a lot easier.

Next I need to learn clamping strategies.

If you prefer to watch

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the 30th episode of the Buddy podcast. I’m your host Buddy Lindsey. And today we’re going to talk about clamps, and we’ll go over 10 different types of clamps that you probably use in your DIY projects and in woodworking to be a little more specific, but many of these will work outside of just woodworking. But before that if you visit the website@buddiy.net, you can get the latest episode and other types of posts as well especially if you sign up for the email newsletter. Please feel free to hit up Facebook and Instagram. Give me a like and a share over there. And finally, if you want to find me on YouTube, you can subscribe over there. Feel free to hit that notification bell so that you know when new episodes are open. Finally, if you want to listen to this in podcast format, we are available in most major podcasting platforms.

So on that, let’s jump into the first segment and that is what’s going on around here. Well, first thing I wanted to start with a non kind of DIY thing. I had a lot of fun this weekend. I was actually over at a family reunion for my wife. It’s kind of unreal … I was kind of bored, didn’t really have a lot to do. So I played around with some new tech called AWS CDK, which is a cloud development kit. It was really cool because I’m working on a nice, working on what I think is going to be a neat website for woodworkers and DIYers. And I will let you know more information about that, but one of the fun things is it’s going to be kind of a distributed cloud thing, kind of as the backend, some fun stuff in that. And it was something I got to learn about and play with for a few hours.

Anyway, if you’re a software developer, check out the cloud development kit by AWS. You might have a lot of fun with it, I really did considering dev ops is kind of part of one of the things that I enjoy doing. So with that, let’s go into more of the DIY stuff. So this week I was kind of curious, I’m planning a bunk bed for my girls. And one of the things I wanted to do is I wanted to do steps. One of the features that I wanted in there is I wanted to do stairs that light up and kind of glow. Specifically I wanted to do purple and pink since it’s my girl’s favorite colors. So one of the things I wanted to do is I was wanting to do a resin pour of some sort, I don’t know yet, and then put some LEDs in there, and then they can kind of turn on and off based on when they want them to come on and off or based on a timer or something.

So I was kind of like, “Hey, I need to figure out how to do resin and epoxy pours, to do that. Plus it’d be super durable.” Anyway, there’s a lot to it that I’m still trying to figure out, but one thing I’ve found is TotalBoat, a company called TotalBoat, if you haven’t heard of them. They have a contact us, and you can actually send them information about the project you’re working on and what your wanting to do and be like, “Hey, here’s my goal. What do I need to buy in order to accomplish that?” And they’ll tell you what you need to know. So really cool shout out to TotalBoat for that. I recommend if you’re wanting to get into resin and epoxy and other things like that, give that a shot. So that was something that’s kind of neat.

And then let’s go into the main DIY wood working project that I did this week that I got the starter back on. And this is actually going to be a mix of this first part, my failure, which leads me into the main segment of clamps. And that is I continue to work on the seven foot bookshelf that I’ve been working for the weekend woodworker course. The weekend woodworker course actually has a three foot high, three and a half foot high area. But I was like, “You know what, I really need a taller one.” So I decided to go up to about 80 inches, and that presented some extra challenges in clamping everything together because in the videos he uses a giant strap clamp, which I’ll get into later, as it clamped everything together.

Well, my strap clamp isn’t that big, and I doubt his as well to be able to do an 80 inch bookcase. So I had to come up with something different because I didn’t have anything long enough to clamp anything down. So I was kind of having to scramble at the last minute. And finally, I just was like, “I can’t get this to work. I’ve got to go basically buy some new clamps slash make some new clamps,” and ended up going to Lowe’s, buying some Irwin bar clamps, and buying some 10 foot black metal and black piping and putting the bar clamps on there. And boom, I have 10 foot clamps now. And then I put did an extra one of the 10 foot, so I can cut them down to five footers so I can have a couple of five foot bar clamps as well, so I can do some cross sections on there.

Yeah, I just, I was like, “I’m tired of not having big enough clamps, so we’re going to have some 10 foot clamps if we need to.” I’ll probably go buy some more black piping and then just kind of put them in the corner at different sizes for different ones that I need, maybe. We’ll see, because after the research I did into clamps and what are the available options, kind of no telling what I’ll buy and what I’ll need into the future. That was kind of my failure is not having big enough clamps. My resolution is I went and made some basically getting the bar clamps. The second resolution is doing a bunch of research into types of clamps and how I want to approach that to know what to get into the future. So I wanted to share the fruits of my research and to give you a little bit of a summary of the different types of clamps that are available for your DIY and woodworking projects.

I want to start off that I actually found a site that listed, like 46 different types of clamps that are available for all wide range of projects. And most of them, not most of them, a lot of them were very project specific into things that I will never do and most DIYers will probably never do. Some of them were not the clamps I was after, kind of like a strap clamps for doing, not strap clamps, but kind of that you would put over a hose end or things like that. I’m not going to go over those because to me that’s a different type of an application of clamp. I’m after more clamps to hold your work steady while you’re doing work on it. Those are the clamps that I am going to discuss today. And I’m going to go over 10 different types of clamps.

So on that, let’s jump into the first clamp, and we’re going to go with the pipe clamp because that’s what I used this week. And basically what you do is you get a pipe that is either a half inch or three quarter inch in diameter, and usually just black piping that you would do for all kinds of different things from running pipe and running stuff throughout your project. The nice thing about pipe clamps is you just buy these two little units that’s an end cap and an adjustable piece, and you just put it on any size pipe that you want length wise, and boom you now have that big of a clamp. The downside is the holding throat capacity, which is how high up the piece that the clamp will go is only a few inches. So it’s not like maybe two, three inches, so you can’t get really high up into a piece. Let’s say it’s a 12 foot tall thing that you’re trying to clamp you can’t go up 12 inches into the middle of it. So you’re going to have to do say one on the bottom and one on the top of the thing.

So that is a drawback. However, you’re able to get a bunch of bar clamps for a lot cheaper than some of the other clamps I’m going to go over here in a minute and be able to get started in the projects that you want to do, especially when you get to bigger projects. And then as you start replacing some of these they’re good for backups when you just run out of clamps because eventually you’ll probably run out of clamps unless you buy like 10 grand worth of clamp. And even then you might be like, “Hey, I can work on all these other projects while these projects are drying.” So you might still run out.

So the next clamp are C clamps or G clamps for some people. To me, whenever I think clamps to clamp something these are the ones that I think of. They are literally in the shape of a C, and you kind of twist this threaded end, and it goes up through the bottom of it and clamps something and holds it together. To me these are the most common clamps that are used that you see, but in actuality in woodworking I don’t see them used all that much because it’s done in favor of a bunch of other clamps. But these are cheap, they’re readily available. If you need a clamp and you need it in a hurry and you don’t have anything else available, these will work great. Plus, you can get some big ones and thick ones. Whereas other types of clamps would be more expensive you can get these and kind of get you by and have a lot of a clamping pressure available to you to really hold onto a piece.

The next type are more specific to woodworking projects, and they’re hand screw clamps. These kind of are weird clamps. My dad has a couple, and I’ve always enjoyed playing with them when I was a kid, never actually saw him use any, but I have seen people on YouTube use them. Basically, they’re the clamps that have two wooden pieces to it. And on the front side there is a little twist piece that has threaded rod. And then on the back is a threaded rod. And when you move it back and forth it shakes a little. It has a narrow point to the end. If you Google a hand screw clamp, you’ll see what I’m talking about.

I never saw my dad use them, but he had a couple. And so I was like, “What do you use these for?” Well, they’re great for woodworking because they’re not going to mar your work. And one of the great uses that I’ve seen is to help you clamp onto something to give it a little bit of a base in order to hold a piece of vertical or in order to hold something vertical where you wouldn’t be able to do that before. However, there’s lots of things that you can do with them, but I just wanted to kind of call out they’re hand screw clamps.

The next one I want to get to is probably the clamps that is one of two clamps that I see used the absolute most. These clamps are the cheaper clamps compared to the ones I’m going to follow up with and are great for starting and is great for in a lot of different cases. These are called bar clamps, and bar clamps are there is a bar that is thinner than it is wide, or I guess taller than it … Anyway, it’s a flat bar that’s really long depending on how long you want your clamp. There’s two pieces that go up, one that’s fixed at the end of the bar, and one that adjusts back and forth. Commonly one of them looks like an F, so they call it an F clamp. You just push this little lever thing and slide it up and down until you get it to the position that you want. And then you turn a little screw piece, and it tightens it down the rest of the way.

These are usually fairly cheap and easy to get ahold of a bunch of them. So that’s where a lot of people start out and getting clamps to go beyond the kind of C clamps. But they are just like the C clamp. They work the exact same way except they’re adjustable in the size of whatever it is that you want to clamp. You can get them from six inches to 24 inches. I think I’ve seen 36 inches, maybe even longer, but those are called bar clamps. Inside of bar clamps there’s several different types. There are F clamps, quick clamps, ratchet clamps, trigger clamps, and Bessie has some rapid action clamps. These are all different bar clamps, but the different ones have different mechanisms for tightening down the work that you need.

The F clamps are your traditional. You have this little metal trigger thing on the side next to the bar. It’s kind of funky to mess with, and you slide it up and down and then tighten it down with a screw. Quick clamps are generally have some kind of trigger system in there or things that you grip with your hand, and it moves it up and down into the system and into where you need it and tightens it down that way. And you don’t necessarily need to twist it with some kind of threaded thing, but it’s still again on a bar. A trigger is kind of like that quick clamp except there’s a little trigger thing there to quickly release it. It gives you a couple of other mechanisms in there.

And then there’s the Bessie rapid action clamp, which is kind of interesting. It’s just like the F clamp, except when you turn the little threaded handle piece it doesn’t turn the entire thread of the thing and twist the actual piece that’s being locked down. It twists an inside mechanism and you have a stationary piece that moves on to the work item so it doesn’t move the thing that you’re trying to glue down as you’re trying to glue it down. It’s a pretty cool little thing. Probably will buy one eventually because some of the demos I’ve seen were pretty awesome. So yeah, bar clamps are numerous in their styles and their size and their configuration and their throat depth. You can go four inch throat or a 12 inch throat, all kinds of things so that you can get deeper into the piece that you’re trying to clamp down.

Probably one of the clamps that you’re going to own a lot of are bar clamps. I know I have a bunch, and they’re great, and they’re great for beginners, but I’m going to move on to some other types of clamps. And that is parallel clamps. Parallel clamps are interesting because they are very similar to the F clamps except they have a couple of different features that I find interesting and compelling for doing woodwork. One of those is the head and the base are thicker and bigger so they can have more contact with the workpiece. F clamps and bar clamps they have these two little knobs in a sense that kind of touch the workpiece, whereas parallel clamps are made to sit and support the entire thing of what you’re working on and how you have multiple of them in parallel. And they have more contact surface on the actual work that you give. There’s all different sizes, but it can give you more stability in what it is that you’re clamping up.

And different companies have different features on them. They’re heavier. They give you more clamping pressure generally than some of the others, and totally liking what I see in parallel clamps. Plus I’ve seen some interesting glue ups that people have done with them to have better stabilization when they have really big pieces or really wonky things that they’re dealing with.

The next clamp that I want to talk about are spring clamps. These are actually kind of a lot of fun to play with on my kids. I’ll kind of grab them because they’re basically like a piece of metal or a piece of plastic or a piece of wood in one case, some really old ones. They’re similar to clothesline clips that you would have, and you just kind of squeeze them. There’s a spring in the middle to open them, and they automatically close, and I’ll chase my daughters a little bit when we’re having fun and act like they’re alligators trying to get them. They just have a lot of fun with that.

But anyway, so they’re spring clamps, and they’re great for just kind of quickly getting something clamped onto a work item so that you can do something more with it here in a little bit. It’s one of those that I use it where I just need to get it attached and holding because I need a third hand, and I don’t have a third hand. I kind of use it as a third hand. An extension on the spring clamps that are actually really, really cool is something made by Rockler, and it’s called a bandy clamp. These are really great for clamping on edges to work pieces because they have a band that goes between the two mouth ends so that you can open up the clamp, push it over a piece of wood that has an edge on it that you’re trying to glue on. And that band will add a lot of extra pressure to that edge piece that you’re trying to glue to the work piece that you’re doing.

Totally check out bandy clamps, and then go check out some YouTube videos on how to fashion some of your own if you don’t want to pay the price for the bandy clamps. But those are really, really cool, and I’m going to do something because I have some stuff coming up where I’m going to be doing edging. So now we’re coming down to our last three clamps, and we’re going to move on to locking clamps. I don’t know if you’ve ever messed with vice grips. Basically, they’re pliers that have a piece in the end that you screw and unscrew to open and close the face. And then whenever you clinch vice grips down onto something, it locks in place and locks the grip onto it.

Well, they have some that are basically just like that four clamps, and these come in all kinds of different ways. Generally see them for welding and they have these big, huge arcs on them. They’re up and down so that you can clamp two pieces of metal together so that you can weld them. They also have them where they have some flat pads at the end of them so that you can get some extra coverage and space. I know Kreg Jig has a locking clamp that has that flat pad on one side, and they have a point on the other so that you can put it inside of a pocket hole so that you can get a good grip on a piece to be able to attach pocket holes to the work that you’re doing. There are a ton of different type of locking clamps that are available for a bunch of different uses. I totally recommend checking some of those out to see if they would help with some of the work that you’re doing.

Next, there are miter clamps, and these are clamps that are meant to go on the corner of wood to hold miters together so that you can either they’re being either glued up or you’re just kind of holding it there temporarily to do something else, all kinds of different things that you might want to do. And then finally our set of clamps that you probably won’t use a lot unless you have a particular type of work bench, but I wanted to mention it because surprisingly, some people have this work brunch but don’t really know what it’s for. Basically, if you have a work bench that has a whole bunch of holes in it, those are called, I think bench dogs is what they’re called. And you can have a clamp that goes down into those holes and clamps down the piece of whatever you’re trying to work on. And all you have to do is you just push it down in there and it cinches down sideways a little bit, and you just take a little mallet and knock it, and it loosens it up and you can pull it out.

These types of clamps, there’s all kinds of things that use these bench dogs that you can do on clamping. I’ve seen some that you get it in there, and then you can tighten it down. You can also have extensions to do other things, clamp multiple different directions. Super useful if you have that kind of a work bench. I don’t know if I’m going to get one like that, but I wanted to mention it so that you were aware that they exist.

So with that we have hit our 10 different types of clamps. I’ll just review them real quick. There’s pipe clamp, C clamp, hand clamp, bar clamp, spring clamp, strap clamp, parallel clamp, locking clamp, miter clamp, and bench dog clamps. So lots of different choices available, each for their different specific uses. Totally recommend you Google a few and see if they’re going to help you with your DIY projects, because if you get the right clamp for the job that you’re doing it’s going to make your life a whole heck of a lot easier.

So with that, we reached the end of the episode, did the failure right before we did the main segment since it led into the main topic of today. So on that note, I want to thank you for your time. I want to thank you for your patience. What do you use clamp wise? What’s your favorite type of clamp, or do you have some other type of clamp that you would recommend that people check out? Go ahead and leave that in comments on the website or on the YouTube video, and I’ll check them out. Thank you for your time. Have a great day.