When I first saw SNIJlab’s lasercut plywood hinge online, I was blown away. I showed Chrissy at Full Circle Arts, we got excited, then decided to launch the SNIJECT project based around it.
The booklet design also includes a laser cut clamp that holds a pad of paper in place. This design is also very cool – and easily overlooked as the hinge is more prominent in the overall design. It wasn’t until I started cutting the booklets and assembling them myself that I realised just how cool the pad clamp is too.
Whilst glueing the clamps onto the booklet covers, I came across a problem. Ideally, you should weigh down or somehow clamp the pieces of plywood you are glueing together to ensure a secure fix. I was struggling to find lots of suitable weights, meaning I could only glue 5 booklets or so at a time.
My thoughts turned to the plywood clamp – perhaps it could be modified to suit my needs – a clamp to secure the pad clamp whilst glueing. I set about trying some designs – rapid prototyping – until I came up with a working design.
As you can see, it took quite a few attempts to get a nicely working design. Problems / things encountered include:
- - Enough leverage to make clamp easy to position
- - Including a jig part to line up the pad clamp correctly
- - Adding holes to allow bolting two clamps together (later ignored, not necessary)
- - Trying different widths / dimensions / shapes / stops for best flexibility and durability
- - Removing ‘teeth’ – they were marking the plywood cover and pad clamps and not needed for this application
- - Rounding corners for ergonomics
This design process was fun and now I can cut my own clamps from the same material as the end product. Working like this has made me think a lot about how having access to the laser cutter has changed the way I do things. I wouldn’t have been able to work through as many revisions as quickly as this if I had to send the design off to be cut and returned for testing. This may lead to careless / lazy prototyping as the cost of testing a new design is cheap. Is this a bad thing? Should I be a more disciplined designer? Should I strive to get something right in, say 5 revisions or less? Or should I embrace this way of working?
leverage to make opening clamp easy
jig piece to line up clamp
clamping one side
both sides clamped
lots of booklets glueing
The SNIJCLAMP design is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. Open up your designs!
Grab the files here:
As ever – bigup to SNIJLAB for sharing the original booklet design.
