Commercial Clamping Frames

[Gary Curtis]

Has anyone used the pneumatic clamping frames for glue-ups? They cost about $8000, so it's not attractive to us hobbyists.

But I thought a self-made frame using a ply sheet with bored holes and a few cheap pneumatic clamps could be shop made. My first stab at glue-ups was about 3 years ago. Talk about skating on thin ice! With the clock ticking because of limits on 'open time' posed by the glue.

We built a new house in 2006 and the cabinet shop folks took me on a tour of their small factory. A steel clamping frame was mounted at about a 60-degree angle against a wall. One of the employees told me how it worked. He said that he was able to turn out 70 face frames in one shift.

A far cry from my dirty, sticky, sloppy, inaccurate gluing.

[Jim Matthews]

You can get about 1/2 that pass through rate with pocket screws and shop jigs, if the frames are uniform in size.

[Ryan Hellmer]

Yeah, in a production environment, output is king. It you've ever seen a nice RF gluing station and clamp carrier in action it would blow your mind. I glue up a bunch of panels and I always have them stacked and leaned and piled until I run out of clamps then start over. Long story short, I just build my kitchen cabinets and had all the face frames (15) together in one evening using pocket screws. I'm very pleased with the results. I would have prefered loose tenons (on my Leigh FMT) but time is no mans friend, and this is a practice house for me.

Ryan

[Mike Schuch]

I found one on Craigslist for several hundred dollars a couple years ago. I couldn't justify the cost for my home shop even at that discount. Not to mention the floor/wall space.

I like the idea of starting the glue up with all the pieces perfectly flat then applying pressure to the side while keeping the frame flat. If you make a home version I would first consider the gluing table surface and look for a material that glue won't stick too... definitely not ply!

For home built, I might also consider several smaller ones instead of one great big table. Maybe 3 foot by 4 foot pieces of Formica covered plywood with a perfect 90 degree L lip along two sides. Some sort of bars on the face to keep the pieces flat and pushed against the table. Then permanently mounted clamping screws coming in from the open sides to push everything together? Build a small wall or floor mounted support to put the mini tables on while clamping then take the table off and put the next one on? Make ten tables and your can do ten doors at a time. Doesn't seem like it would be very amenable to a large face frame though unless you had one about 4' by 8'?

[Mike Schuch]

Something like this:
198295

[Gary Curtis]

The size of the equipment I saw made it impractical for most shops. On the Festool Forum (FOG), one guy used his Multi Function Table as a dedicated clamping station. For easy cleanup, he mounted a steel roller with waxed butcher paper on one end of the table. He would pull out a length to cover the entire table, then poke the shaft of his clamps through the paper and the 20mm holes in the top. He obviously had the money for this arrangement.

But as good as the Festool clamps are, they can't match the speed and flexibility of the pneumatic clamps on the rig I saw. The user would insert fences or stops along two edges of the work. Then, on opposite edges, he mounted two pneumatic pistons. A quick flick of the valve, and everything was square and tight. Just as in the Festool MFT/3 table. the clamping frame allows infinite arrangement of the pistons and fences (or stop) by virtue of the rows of perforations that accept the mounting shafts.

[Jeff Duncan]

There's no question those clamping rigs are great, but so are widebelts, vertical panel saws, edgebanders, and CNC routers. Fact is the bigger the shop the more fun toys can be had. For a small shop though these are far from necessary and probably even impractical. I can glue up a kitchens worth of doors in a day and it's not that messy nor time consuming per door. It's really like many things in life, the more you do it the better you get at it. I'd bet you do much better and quicker in the future too!
good luck,
JeffD