Soldering Clamp Tool or Menu/Recipe Card Stand

A couple of 3D printed clamps to help with simple soldering joints or to hold display or recipe cards.

It's been designed on TinkerCAD so can be copied and modified to a design that is wanted, or just made as is.

I've made two basic types, one is a fixed width clamp and the other adjustable, where the two sides can be moved apart to give extra reach or separated completely if desired.

To operate the clamp, squeeze the button on the front backwards to open and then release to close.

The adjustable version must be slid apart and then slid back together at the desired width.

While the title says soldering tool, it could easily be used as a stand for an information card, instruction sheet, menu, recipe or anything else that needs clamping upright.

All the parts are 3D printed

Pictures of all the printed parts are shown. In the TinkerCAD drawings, parts are shown with a surrounding boundary to provide the best printing performance on low quality 3D printers. If using a good quality printer then these are probably not required. The attached files do not include these boundaries.

Once parts for the chosen design have been printed and cleaned, assembly is very simple.

Push the moving part of the clamp into the slot from the top and slide it up to the fixed part of the clamp.

Compress the spring and push it into the gap behind the moving part. There are recesses in both the clamp and the frame to secure it.

To operate, press the moving clamp inwards against the spring and insert the item to be held in between the jaws then release the moving clamp.

To release an item, press the moving clamp again and remove the item before releasing it.

The clamp is plastic which melts at a low temperature so when soldering can only be used to hold components or parts of components that will remain cool.

As it stands, this is an easy to make project if you have ready and cheap access to a 3D printer.

Possible improvements are to reduce the size of the clamps and increase the size of the spring to give greater jaw gap, in mine it's about 4mm now which is enough for most of the wires I want to solder or any light card.

Add a turntable underneath for rotating.

Add a hinge to allow the clamped item to flip-flop back and forth as it's worked on.

Add an angle to the clamps to hold a card at an angle for easier reading