Here's an alternative, if you'd rather spend some time building something, than money buying clamps. This is a universal body clamping rig that I built almost 30 years ago. It was under a workbench collecting dust, but Jeremy recently pulled it out and used it. It still works fine.
Here's the explanation of this old scary-looking rig, pulled from one of Freekmagnet's threads:
Yeah, Jeremy was planning out how to clamp up the top on this body, and I pointed out a bunch of dusty contraptions tucked under a bench in Unit 2. An ancient gluing fixture that I thought up and built back around 1993. When I was 28 years younger and just getting going as a Luthier. Fixtures from my youth, rediscovered!
It's really four separate fixtures; he's using three of them above. Each one is a fairly strong frame with two rows of 7 jacking bolts. Lined up in a row, they form a grid of 56 clamps covering the whole area of an instrument body. And they are all individually adjustable, so you can make sure the whole area is clamped down tightly, even if the top is a bit uneven. They also work for gluing a small area in the middle of a body, like a patch block in a pickup rout. It's a universal body top gluing fixture.
The jacking bolts are standard 1/4-20 x 5" bolts. Each one has a 1/4-20 T-nut pressed up into the underside cross beam. I made 1" wide strips of 3/4" MDF with saw kerfs cut in them, to be the pads that the bolts press down onto. But, you can put smaller chunks of wood in there for clamping specific areas. The frames are made from 2 x 4's. Real simple construction.
Yes, we use an electric drill with a 7/16" socket to quickly spin the bolts down. That's a lot of bolts! And a 7/16" Nutdriver to tighten them.
You are all welcome to copy the design and make your own version. This fixture works very well for one-off jobs clamping a thin top on a body. It's kind of slow, but it can be finely adjusted. For my own Scroll Basses, I built the Stacked Platen fixture set. It's much faster, and can handle up to 4 bodies at a time.
That's why these fixtures were sitting under a bench, covered with dust and sawdust. I don't use them often anymore, but I keep them ready and waiting for an unusual job to come along......like Jeremy's bass!
Bishop JP asked if a fixture like this could also be used for clamping thin curved tops:
Yes, this style of fixture would work well for clamping a thin top to a curved surface. You can put small wood block pads under each bolt tip in highly curved areas, or use longer strips of wood with saw kerfs on more gentle curves. You could even make the whole fixture especially to fit a curved shape, by angling the bolts out at the ends of each row. To whatever contour you want.
As you can see, the construction is real easy. Six pieces of 2 x 4 screwed together. Drill 9/32" holes through the upper beams for the bolts, and press 1/4-20 T-nuts in on the bottom side.
The thread where Jeremy uses it is here:
Sirena Instrumentos Musicales - Expositions and Aspirations Regarding Luthiery in Fillmore, CA
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