Door and Window Press - New build and advice requested!

[Boydage]

Hi. Today I bought 8m of 100 x 50 6mm box section. This along with 10 double action pneumatic actuators 150mm stroke and I plan to buy more bits and pieces to build a nice square press for keeping windows and doors flat whilst clamping them up using pneumatic control. It will be 2.2m W x 1.8mH.

I do have a pretty good plan. Not drawn up yet, but plan to have the pneumatic rams with the ability to be moved all around the framework and in any direction X and Y or -X and -Y. I am also considering putting rams in to hold the work down in the Z direction, this for the "rushed" mortise and tennons that are not perfect ha ha.

My request is for anyone who has a clamping table and wishes they had put in a particular action increasing the scope of the press. Or any mistakes that anyone might have made?

It is always good to draw on the advice from experience. If anything I have learnt is that I know nothing! Ha.

Boyd

[Skew ChiDAMN!!]

I'd suggest putting the z-clamping on a seperate control to the x/y, to enable your being able to 'nudge' recalcitrant frames into square before having it clamped solid in all three dimensions. (Similarly, x/y work well together on the same activator, but sometimes I'd like to disengage one while leaving the other clamped.)

It'd also be nice if the z-direction clamps were set up in such a way that you could use a measure stick to check the diagonals w/out the $%^& rams getting in the way and making simple things awkward. DAMHIKT. ;)