Pinch Rod

I was inspired by a recent project by MrRick who posted a shop made pinching rod last week. It’s a basic shop tool and I’ve been meaning to build one for a while, but I never got around to it. So I decided to knock one out today. I’d been thinking about how to make my clamping mechanism since he posted his, so I went out and toured through my nuts and bolts, but I didn’t find anything that really jumped out at me. So, I tooled down to my local ACE Hardware and wandered a bit. Nice thing to do on a Sunday morning after coffee!

I found some square jam nuts in 1/2”-13 and I had a flash of brilliance (could have been a burp, I’m not totally sure)…with the square edge of the jam nut, I could weld on a piece of angle iron to complete a C-channel type bracket, that would let me use various rods without having to be a fixed width. A nice 1/2” bolt with a flushed edge would give wide purchase so as not to unduly scar the wooden rods. I found some sexy allen-keyed SS bolts that looked hand friendly and I was off for home.

I hunted around for some scrap and found some nice thin walnut that sliced up cleanly to make a set of rods. They’re about 9/16” wide and 5/16” thick, so the pair works out to be 5/8” thick when combined inside the clamps.

I cut down some angle iron and mocked it up against the rod blanks. Anyone who works with metal knows the inside radius of angle iron isn’t a sharp angle, but a little time with a metal file took care of that.

I used a scrap sized just a bit thicker than the combined thickness of the rod set, then just clamped them in place and blasted away with the welder. Easy peasy! A bit of work on the 2x72 made quick work of my shitty welds, and Bob’s your uncle.

The clamps sized out just right against my rod set, but those beautiful SS bolts were longer than I wanted, so I resized them on the horizontal bandsaw which, incidentally, left a really clean, flat face that needed only a bit of work on the wheel to clean up. I was thinking I’d have to turn them flat on the lathe, but no need! Nice little clamps they are!

So, not being able to leave well enough alone, and spending the day on the metal side of the shop, I ran the clamp bodies through the media blaster the gave them a quick powder coating. The pics don’t show it super well, but the powder is called Copper Vein. It gives a nice ‘crackle’ appearance and the color and texture look nice against the walnut rods.

So, back to the rods. Not much to do there. I cleaned them up and squared them on the bench using my favorite little Sargent #2 sized plane. I beveled the ends by eye and cleaned up the edges.

Wanting to be able to also size outside diameters, I found some 5/32” SS rod in the metal stash and drilled the ends of the rods for it. Trimmed down the SS and beveled them using my little needle vise while a couple coats of BLO soaked into the rods. Lastly, I set the SS pins into the rods with a couple taps.

The clamps may be a little thicker than would be ideal, but they’re easy to adjust, don’t mar the walnut rods, and look good to me!

Not a bad way to spend a Sunday.  As a bonus, I pulled out the first batch of volunteer strawberries of the season while the powder coat was cooking! Thanks for reading…