Tips & Tricks: Leather-Clad Clamps

As much as I love my parallel jaw clamps, I don’t have a lot of them, and often have to bring pipe clamps into play on a project as well. Pipe clamps work fine for many jobs, but their unevenly cast jaws have the unfortunate tendency to mar workpieces. I’ve found that the solution is to attach thick leather pads to the jaw faces using contact cement. In addition to preventing dents, the leather helps keep the jaws from sliding around while positioning the clamps for case glue-ups and other operations.