The Best Clamps for Woodworking: Five That Cover the Work

The standard joke is that you can never have enough clamps. It is not quite true. What you can never have enough of is one kind of clamp — parallel bar clamps, when you are gluing a panel. For everything else, one or two of the right type beats a drawer full of the wrong type.

This guide covers five clamps that do five different jobs. If you already own eight F-clamps and still find yourself stuck, the gap is almost certainly one of these.

Parallel clamps are the only ones worth buying in quantity

A plain bar clamp or F-clamp applies force through a jaw that can tip. Under real pressure, the jaw rocks a few degrees, and the panel between the jaws bends to match — which is why a panel can come out of the clamps with a gentle curve across its width that no amount of sanding removes.

Parallel clamps hold the jaws square to the bar under load. That is the entire difference, and it is worth the money for panel glue-ups specifically.

Two things follow from this. First, buy them in pairs and alternate them above and below the panel, so the clamping pressure is balanced through the thickness rather than all applied to one face. Second, you need fewer than you think — clamps every 200 to 250mm along a panel is plenty. More clamps is not more flatness; it is just more squeeze-out.

Clamping pressure is not the specification that matters

Manufacturers publish maximum clamping force, and it is close to irrelevant for woodworking. PVA glue needs enough pressure to close the joint and hold it, not enough to crush it. A joint squeezed until the glue line is starved is weaker than one with a full glue line at moderate pressure.

If you are cranking a clamp hard to close a gap, the joint does not fit. Fix the joint.

The workholding problem nobody names

Most clamping frustration is not about the glue-up at all. It is about holding one piece of wood still while you do something to it — plane it, rout it, chisel a mortice, drive a screw into an assembled corner.

That is a different problem, and a vice plus two holdfasts solves more of it than any number of bar clamps. A holdfast holds the work flat to the bench with nothing standing above the surface, so the tool can cross the whole face. It is the oldest workholding device in the shop and still the most useful thing you can add to a bench.

What to buy first

If you own nothing: a pair of 24in parallel clamps and two holdfasts. That combination handles panel glue-ups and almost all bench work.

If you build cabinets or boxes: add the right-angle clamp before you add more bar clamps. Carcases go out of square in the thirty seconds between assembly and the first fastener, and that clamp owns those thirty seconds.

If you keep fighting the workpiece rather than the joint: SuperJaws. It is not a woodworking clamp so much as a portable third person.

A note on cauls

Before buying more clamps, try cauls — two lengths of straight timber with a slight crown, clamped across the panel at each end, crown-side down. They spread pressure across the whole width and do more for panel flatness than doubling your clamp count. They cost nothing and most people never make a set.