Clamps!
It's a well known fact in wood working that you can never have enough clamps. But clamps are expensive. So when I ran out again during a recent project, I decided to browse the local classifieds to see if there might be a good deal to be had.
There was one seller, offering a “bunch of clamps” asking for an offer. After a bit of back and forth, with me in the comfortable position of not really needing these clamps and him wanting to get rid of them fast, I got a very very good price. The only downside was that I had to drive to the other end of the city to pick them up.
This is the result of my three hour haul:
As you can see, they were all a bit rusty and dirty, but generally in working order. So the next step was to clean them up using a combination of drill and Dremel powered wire brushes and sand paper.
Here's some before and after shots:
Since most of the clamps were missing the protective plastic caps, I needed to find a replacement. I found this OpenSCAD model which allowed me to easily create custom fit caps for each clamp. To do so, I labeled each clamp 1) and created a spreadsheet with all the needed dimensions.
I wanted a soft material, so I decided this was a good opportunity to try TPU printing. I basically followed this post on the Prusa Forums to configure the print settings. The first caps came out a bit bumpy but adding some retraction fixed that.
Finally it was time to reorganize my clamp storage to fit all my new and old clamps. Previously I had them simply clamped to an old IKEA kitchen rail.
I replaced the rail with a French cleat (of course) and created gallows style hangers - simple but but works.
