Box Corners Clamp

clamp and kitten

With bonus kitten!

If you’ve ever tried to sew a leather box, you know how much of a pain it can be to keep everything lined up. Nigel Armitage does a good tutorial video on the process and also shows his simple solution to holding everything together at a nice 90-degree angle.

After spending 30 minutes doing a piss-poor job of sewing the first two pieces of the latest project together, I decided I needed to build one for myself. Considering I have limited table surface in my apartment hobby shop, I decided to make it as an attachment for the stitching horse, kind of like a Hardy for an anvil.

I had a 12″ board lying around after a false-start of a shelving project, so I nudged Nigel’s idea a bit and just butted two pieces into a “roof” shape, then sandwiched a pair of off-cuts and beveled them to act as the stem. Two more off-cuts get a similar bevel and become clamp arms. $3 worth of hardware later, it’s a clamp!

Of course, this won’t allow you to do all the seams of a box – eventually, you end up building an inside form as you attach the 4th wall and bottom, but it makes the first couple seams that much easier.

ClampClamp front

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