Panel door clamping jig

[Ole Anderson]

After having just glued up 30 raised panel doors/drawer fronts involving 150 pieces of wood, I am wondering if there is a better way than just using parallel clamps and a square to do the job. I remember seeing some type of jig that squared up the panel and had a provision for clamping and kept the whole door flat. Is there such an animal?

[Michael Dunn]

Clamping blocks of some sort. They can hold the 4 parallel clamps in place and remain square. As for keeping it flat I don't think such a device exists. If it weren't for glue squeeze out it would be a fairly simple to design such a thing.

[Michael Heffernan]

Production shops, small and large use these types of systems. Sometimes you can find them used. Pricey if you don't make panel doors often, but definitely more efficient and easier to control squareness/flatness.

http://http://jltclamps.com/stile_and_rail_squaring

[Tom Scott]

Matthew Teague had a very simple (yet effective) one in Popular Woodworking a while back...http://www.popularwoodworking.com/woodworking-blogs/editors-blog/quick-jigs-for-flat-and-square-glue-ups

[Andy Pratt]

I focus on making sure my rail/stiles have perfectly square joinery, and as long as that is true the doors always come out square as long as I clamp the joints tightly (cope and stick, floating solid wood panels). I find that as long as I don't overclamp I don't have to worry about bowing of the door, but bowing is more of a problem with cope and stick than dowels with a glued in ply panel for example. If I had a bad bowing problem I would clamp the door down to the bench or some other flat surface as shown in the matt teague link, then you have to deal with pressed in glue squeeze out.

[Richard Coers]

I agree with Andy. If you joinery isn't going to come out square, that Popular Woodworking fixture will give you some gaps at the joint if it is strong enough. I always make my doors oversize anyway. That lets me make a really clean cut after glue up.

[Michael Dunn]

The current issue of Wood has a similar jig sent in by a reader. It's a face frame clamping jig. With some mods it could provide what you need.

[Chris Fournier]

I wouldn't build or pay for a panel press for 30 panels. Parallel clamps and a couple of "t" bars to set the panels on are all that is requierd to have flat panels fly out of your shop. A small shop is not a factory and the pursuit of this philosophy will only make a ridiculous mess of your efforts. A small shop needs to be versatile and adaptable. Efficiency is in the universality of the tools and the ingenuity of the craftsman. Good technique counts for something too...

[J.R. Rutter]

I used a pair of K-bodies per door for many years before I got busy enough for a JLT setup. 10 - 15 minutes in the clamps is enough for yellow glue, so you don't need a huge pile of clamps.

[Bill Neely]

I've been shooting a pin into the joint from the back of the panel while they are still clamped - I can unclamp and set aside.

[Ole Anderson]

I just use a pair of K-Body Bessys now and use a carpenter's square to square the panel just before I tighten the clamps. I am done with the panels, but have a bunch of drawers to do. Not sure how much it would help there though. I'll have to think about it. The jig doesn't look any more complicated than a nice TS sled, and that is a common fixture in a non-production shop. If it makes it easier, it might be worth it. I, too, always take a sliver off the top and bottom of each panel using my sled to true it up. I enjoy spending two hours building a jig to save 15 minutes on a project, hoping it will see a lot of future use. Doesn't always work out. But then I am a hobbyist without production schedules. I will say though, that a number of the jigs I made were very worthwhile with regards to speed and accuracy.

[Rich Engelhardt]

The current issue of Wood has a similar jig sent in by a reader. It's a face frame clamping jig. With some mods it could provide what you need.There, the reader stuck a piece of peg board to an old hollow core door and used the holes in the peg to screw cleats down where needed.


[A small shop needs to be versatile and adaptable. Couldn't agree more....& things that can do double or triple duty - plus be cheap to throw together - are well worth the effort.


I enjoy spending two hours building a jig to save 15 minutes on a project, hoping it will see a lot of future use.I might have exactly what you're after then.
This is a variation of a portable work surface Shop Notes magazine had a few years ago.
They used 1/2" plywood for the top & the support rails (you can see them on the end view on the 2nd picture).
Their version, with the fold down legs, weighed in at 12 pounds.

On this one, I used regular peg board and got the weight down to about 5 pounds by eliminating the fold down legs and using a pair of cheap plastic saw horses.

Since the holes in the peg board are all pretty exact in both size and placement, I picked up some 1/4" dowel rods & will be using them to act as dogs on some pieces of 3/4" plywood I'll use as moveable cleats.

If you want, I can take a picture of the underside to show you how it goes together.
Once you see the underside, the whole construction process is pretty self explanatory.
The most tedious/time consuming part of making one is drilling out the 2" holes in the support rails to lighten the overall weight.

The best feature, because the top is peg board, is that storage isn't a problem - it's an asset. Just cut the edge of one of the supports to 45* and make it a french cleat so it can hang on the wall and act as pegboard.

[Mark Bolton]

Ole,
We use a simple wall mounted shop made face frame table I posted a couple images of in another thread I cant find at the moment. Its nothing special but we use it for virtually anything that will fit on it. Face frames, doors, picture frames, drawer boxes, anything. When I took these photos I had just put new fences (2" wide right angle stops) on it but it normally has several destaco's around the perimeter and also a vertical fence on the left. The fences are not glued on, just screws, so they can be changes when they get covered in glue and full of holes from moving destaco's around.

I put a fence on the left as well so you can clamp one door up on the right, then move to the left and clamp another while the glue sets on the first. You just ping pong from left to right endlessly because as JR mentioned, 15 minutes or so in the clamps is all you need. If we have a few doors the same height we can clamp up multiples on the left and right so often times we will have 2 doors left, 2 right. Lets you get 6-8 doors an hour put together.

It really speeds things up. Ran a batch of doors and fronts Thursday and Friday, all five piece, raised panel, roman arch on the doors (like the ones in the picture). Managed about 30 in the 2 days. Thats with me breaking down and milling, and another assembling. We do a fair amount of doors but not enough to warrant the JLT "yet" and other than the clamps getting a bit cumbersome I cant imagine assembling doors or face frames without something other than clamps on a bench.

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-IQVTgQfdTak/UUiHBhxeZYI/AAAAAAAABTI/aihWBlyhYtM/w403-h301-p-o/IMG_2119.JPG
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-1D1qkychWM8/UUiHHK_t-lI/AAAAAAAABSg/16HgWP0SrII/w403-h301-p-o/IMG_2121.JPG
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-uFwrug2LgXI/UVyEUNJfthI/AAAAAAAABXc/O4sgtZNZqBw/w227-h303-p-o/IMG_00020.jpg

[Ole Anderson]

Some good ideas there, thanks. My next project will be building the drawers for my kitchen. I ran across this today: box clamps from Woodpecker. Anyone tried these? They look pretty trick. http://www.woodpeck.com/boxclampm2.html?utm_source=Announcement%3A+MayProd uct+Drawing+-+Woodpeck+-+Main&utm_campaign=Announcement%3A+MayProduct+Drawing+-+Woodpeck+-+Main&utm_medium=email