With my shoulder laid up, I have been trying to do some limited shop maintenance that pretty much involves one arm. While I can manipulate the fingers and elbow, they don’t want me to pick stuff up or have my arm go above my shoulder. Needless to say, that limits what I can do.
One thing I can do, which you have to do every so often, is clean the glue off my clamps. As you can expect, during glue ups, sometimes there is glue squeezing out, and it can fall on the clamps. No matter how much I clean up, some of it ends up drying on the clamps, and over time, that can make the clamps difficult/impossible to work.
I’ve tried a variety of processes (chiseling it out, using warm water, vinegar, special solvents, etc.) but recently hit across a relatively low effort process which doesn’t involve me stressing my right arm.
In this case, you take a 10’ section of 1-1/2” plastic pipe and a couple of plastic pipe caps. You cut them in half (using a handsaw with my left arm was fun) and glue the caps on the bottom (using plastic pipe cleaner and then glue). Once it has dried, its on to cleanup.
As you can see, the glue is somewhat packed on here, and these are some of the better ones. Some of my clamps are so caked up, they have stopped working.
The solution I use is a 5% vinegar solution (you can buy a gallon of it at your grocery store). One gallon will fill two pipes almost to the top. You don’t want to fill it to the top, because it will overflow when you put in the clamps. Disassemble the clamp and then insert it into the pipes. Let them site for 3+ hours.
After that, you can pull the clamps out, and the glue will have melted (mostly). You can easily use a scratch pad to clean it all off.
After cleaning it off and wiping it down, you can put on a coat of paste wax to make it move easier and prevent the glue from sticking as easily.
In the space of a day (when I was able to walk away and do other things) I was able to clean off all my clamps and get them ready for the new year. Yay!
Kevin