i've been building this big band saw and that involves lots and lots and lots of clamping and
i've come to realize these skinny handles on some of these clamps is a terrible ergonomic shape fat
handles like this are quite a bit better but i've also been using these clamps which i made using
some knobs that already had a square shape like that and i've come to realize this is actually
a really great shape for grabbing it's very ergonomic more so than three points or five points
so for this bandsaw i've been making knobs like that for turning as well
and i thought what if i could put a knob like that on a clamp so i've been thinking how can i
join something like this to the handle and this is often the case the answer is the pantorouter
because i can use that to carve a tenon of an exact shape on the end of an existing piece of
wood so let's make a knob for this clamp and i'll use my not quite finished yet fan saw
so that fits very snugly on the test tenon i carved and i carved that using a circular template
so that the router sweeps around a circle leaving a round tenon in the middle i had
to rig up a special clamping block to clamp this on there i used my bandsaw of course
that wasn't clamped down hard enough fortunately i've got lots of handle left okay take two
still got to glue that on but this one actually screwed up twice so the knob
is really short and i think i like that one more so i'll shorten that one too
i've modified 12 of my clamps including some of the nice specy ones
let's do a little clamp comparison
so i'll tighten this one down real good
and now let's try this knob
easy of course it's possible those handles are deliberately hard to
turn to prevent over tightening and for some uses like attaching a stop block to a fence
that knob can get in the way which is why i won't be doing all of my clamps this way
and they present a bit of a challenge on the clamp rack but it's not as bad as i thought it would be
ran out of medium length modified clamps there but they sure are nice to use you