With so much of my work being planed and trued by hand I use something of a simple strategy that really works well and especially with the short lengths we generally use in furniture making. Though of course we have long lengths for bedsides, head boards, tabletops and wardrobes but the rails and stiles, frames...
Read the full post A Quick Truing Strategy on Paul Sellers' Blog.
In building our latest project in the Sellers’ Home bedroom series I relied on my bandsaw for many of the long and often heavy rip cuts. I expect many of those building the same projects might well decide to do the same. Mostly, this was to do with the type of different and often random...
Read the full post A Good Blade on Paul Sellers' Blog.
When I wrote Essential Woodworking Hand Tools it was less about the tools and more about what was missing from books I read and saw through the decades in books often entitled something like ‘The Woodworker’s Bible‘, usually commissioned by publishers known for their educational books, people like that. What mainly was missing was the...
Read the full post Essential Woodworking Hand Tools on Paul Sellers' Blog.
. . . or the lure of a mechanised performance! The most predictable thing about wood is its unpredictability. I would say that that is the case in most natural materials used in most crafts and that is why we have such a predominance of man-made alternative materials; for any type of mass-making the materials...
Read the full post The Lure of Unpredictable . . . on Paul Sellers' Blog.
I’m still grateful for the workshop I work in: it’s the one I close the door on at night and then open at first light. I reach inside for the light switch and light floods what was left the night before. There’s always the certainty of gratitude that so too floods my mind for the...
Read the full post Yesterday on Paul Sellers' Blog.
I don’t follow but two others online. One is a cafe I haven’t been able to go back to because I no longer live near to it and the other is a support for those with a disability. But I clicked on an Instagram account of someone following me and saw something I had not...
Read the full post It Was A Humbling Thing on Paul Sellers' Blog.
I’ve seen (and read) a lot of clamp reviews over the years. Most of them cobble together a series of pseudo-scientific testing parameters and torture tests that seem important, but actually do very little to tell you how the clamps will perform over the course of years in your shop. So when I decided to conduct a review of the Harbor Freight Bremen Parallel Clamps, I knew I had to approach this with a common sense frame of mind. We won’t be testing the flatness of panels, the squareness of the heads, or the clamping force available (watch this video to see why – The Truth about Parallel Clamps). Instead, we’re going to do something incredibly ground-breaking: we’re going to use the clamps for a few months. I purchased four clamps directly from my local Harbor Freight and used the clamps in numerous glueups. In between glueups, the clamps were exposed to daily stress via mock glueups. One of the clamps was designated as the “abuse clamp” and received a little more rough treatment than the other three, which included some rough handling as well as repeated dragging of the head over the serrated bar.
The video goes into a lot of detail so be sure to watch it if you want the full story, but here’s a quick summary. Out of the four clamps, one failed after a few months of use as evidenced by constant slipping under pressure. After dissecting the clamp, it appeared that the malleable head material was ground smooth, which lead to the premature smoothing of the serrated teeth on the bar. As a result, the head could no longer grip the bar. Oddly enough, the clamp that failed was NOT the clamp that received the additional abuse. We tested the Lifetime Guarantee by returning the clamp to our local Harbor Freight and the clamp was exchanged for a new one with no questions asked.
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality and performance of the Harbor Freight Bremen Parallel Clamps. In spite of the premature failure I experienced, I think many woodworkers would be well-served by these clamps especially given the cost savings and the peace of mind provided by the lifetime guarantee. But if you put a lot of hours on these clamps, I suspect you’ll be testing that return policy sooner than later.
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