Inside Phil's Bunker
Designing Clamping Cauls
When you glue up a box or dovetail joint, you want to apply pressure as close to the fingers as possible. There are several box joint caul products for sale that allow you to put pressure directly on the fingers. This makes for a very tight joint. Unfortunately, these won’t work when you have variably sized and or spaced fingers. pyRouterJig includes the ability to make clamping cauls for your custom joints on your positioner. To turn this on, go to the View menu and select Caul Template. You should now see the template for cutting the cauls. Here is the template that we will use for this tutorial. It is used in
The caul template makes fingers 1/16” smaller than the actual joint fingers. Note that pyRouterJig does not show the caul finger outline. Use this like you would use the other template – print it out and stabilize it. For information on that, see the pyRouterJig tutorial. However, you will want to cut the cauls differently from standard box joints.