Teardrops n Tiny Travel Trailers

I’ve been using this technique to help align glue-ups without adding a bunch of extra fasteners or having to deal with the extra holes that come along with them.

I hope some of you will find it helpful. I’m not sure that it is an original idea, but it just sort of came to me and seems to work well.

Basically I’m using small pieces of scrap wood (in this case 1/4 inch thick ripped 2x at about 2-1/2 inches long) with double backed tape applied as temporary alignment blocks. This really helps keep the piece being glued from squirming around in the glue when you go to apply the clamps. I had these scraps from another part of my build and have been using them as protectors under clamps all along, but you could pretty much use any small pieces of wood.

This was really important to me while working on my prefabricated ceiling panel where I didn’t want any fasteners to show from the inside, and for laminating a thin plywood screw flange flap along the front edge of the thin ceiling panel where screws or nails just wouldn’t work.

Here is a pic showing the glue up of the screw flange along the front lip of the ceiling panel to help pull the edge of the panel down that last little bit at the front radius. (Disregard the square wooden screw washers in the field of the front curve.)

(The extra backer piece under the clamps was just temporary to help spread the clamp pressure and to keep the edge of the panel flat until the glue dried).

You can see the alignment blocks better in this pic after removing the clamps. First I clamped the 2 inch wide screw flange overlapping the bottom edge of the ceiling panel, and then I stuck the blocks on the panel so that they were butting up against the flange.



From there I could remove the flange, apply the glue and return the flange back into perfect alignment. If you stick the spring clamps on with a little bias they will tend to drive the piece into the blocks.

Here’s another example (actually, a reenactment) showing how I used the taped on pucks to help align my roof spars to the top of the panel (the clamp job was more complicated and done on the bench… check my build thread for more details on that).


The double backed tape I’m using is the heavy duty stuff with fiberglass core.


I fold a piece back on itself and use a cheap extending blade utility knife to cut the tape in one clean action thru the peel ply, otherwise it can fray, and/or bunch up (scissors can get gummy from the adhesive and are harder to clean than the knife).


Obviously, stick the tape on the puck and peel the peel ply off.


When it comes time to remove the pucks, I use a straight edged kitchen knife (with a stiff but relatively thin blade that I got for cheap from the Goodwill store) and slide it straight in under the edge. Once the blade is far enough in the puck will usually pop right off.

If not a slight twist will do the trick.

Sometimes glue squeeze out will stick and rip an edge off of the pucks…


… but it is a simple matter to clean these off with a scrapper or chisel.


I suppose you could tape the edges or maybe stick a little wax on there to keep this from happening, but you can get a couple of uses out of each block and it’s no big deal to just clean them up after the fact.

The glue from the tape will gum up the knife blades, so have a can of acetone, a rag or paper towel, and some disposable rubber gloves handy for occasional clean up.

Good technique! Thanks.

My pleasure kind sir.

Nice!

Wood floor in your shop?

Rob

Here's another adhesive based trick..... A friend of mine is a joiner, and it heard him use the phrase 'glue and rubbed joint'. I'd never heard of this, so asked him to explain... Here's an external link to some info...

http://forums.finewoodworking.com/fine- ... /rub-joint

An old school technique, for clamping rather than alignment, that works even better with modern materials is to shoot staples across a strip of polyprop packaging/strapping band. The band is strong enough that the staple doesn't indent the wood and pulling up the band pulls out at least one leg of the staple without marking, so it's easy to grab the staple to pull the other leg out.


I learnt this from guys building cold-moulded (yeah, OK, 'cold-molded') plywood boats who had to tack each strip of wood in place until the glue set.

In case it could cause psychological damage to any male reader, I won't tell you that I used a manual stapler to mock up that photo.....

48Rob wrote:Wood floor in your shop?

My friend is graciously allowing me to occupy the loft of his modern timber frame barn. I'm building the proverbial "ship in a bottle". Once the cabin is complete we will use the overhead hoist to lower it nose (or more likely tail) first thru the shipping hatch located under the current build location. For more details on the loft arrangement and to see how the shipping hatch works, check out this portion of my build thread.

The rub and grab technique sounds interesting, but I can see why it would only be used for backing blocks; placement is not critical. The advantage of the double backed tape is that the blocks come off easy w/o leaving a mark.

I have heard of the staple and banding strap trick, and tested that earlier for another job, but what I found was that short staples that don't pierce the thin panel don't have any holding power. I don't know, this just seems to work better for me on the jobs that I have used it for.

Good idea... hope I can remember it when the situation of need arises....

KC,

Nice friend...and really nice table saw setup!

Rob

PS. hot glue also works well to mount temporary clamping blocks, holds well and pops right back off.