Has anybody tried this?

[Ben-Had]

If you use the radius disks, they make great gluing cawls. You can also make a set of clamp cawls with heavy foarm tape. I use the neoprene tape and lay it out in the profile of the guitar , that is your cawl and you can use weight or a gew bar clamps.
The key is that you dry fit the back and top so that you don't need much force. If ken uses rubber bands, he did a good job of fitting and that is the key. Ant forced joint is doomed to failure. We will be shooting video of this soon for the you tube series . Keep an eye open

Thanks John. One of my first thoughts when looking for a different way was the radius dishes, heck I used them to sand those radiuses, why not to clamp as well. So you confirmed my thought process and I think that's the way I'll go. I be watching for the video, I've watch most of your others (some several times), very useful.

Tim B

[Ben-Had]

You could always make your own cam clamps:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/steve.mask ... uthier.htm

got short scraps/cutoffs? glue? time? If you want to get fancy, go to Lowe's and get some 1X1/8" steel bar stock cheap.

I actually found that site when I was searching, also had article from old "Guitar Maker" issue on making the clamps. I'm missing some of the tools I think I would need to make them, that's why I went searching for an alternative. Thanks for the help.

Tim B

[Mike Lindstrom]

For my last couple, I tried this -- I screwed a piece of flat mdf to one side of my mold with 0.75" spacers to keep it a bit off the surface of the mold. Then I can index the front of the body against the mdf, giving my a solid support to push against with shaping and sanding, as well as a registered stop keeping the sides located in the mold consistently. Seems to work ok.

Made gluing easy too. Set it back side down in the dish and piled weights on top of the mdf. Once the back is on everything was a lot more solid and I removed the board to work on the front.

It did get in the way and made clamping in the blocks a pain. I probably should use the mdf to help align and clamp those better.

BTW - New here. Thanks for setting it up.

Mike