No, that's not a new addition to my "kinky tools" toolbox .
As any of you that are following my build thread know, right now I'm replacing the floor pans in the Pumpkin.
One of the little tools I'm using are sheet metal butt clamps. These are clamps that do two things, they clamp the panels together and keep them aligned and they also allow a constant .040" gap between the panels. This makes for a much easier fitting and butt welding of the panels.
One thing that was annoying me though was, unless you can reach both sides of the panel, it takes two people to use them .
They work by sliding a thin clamp through the gap between the panels and sliding a lock through a hole in the clamp, then you tighten the clamp with a wing nut to draw the lock into the panel and hold everything into place.
I ran into this problem when I was going to weld in new floor pans. I could reach the sides of the pan outboard of the frame, but any clamps on the inside of the frame will take two people. One to position the clamp and tighten the wing nut and a second to go underneath the truck and slide the lock in and hold it until the wing nut is tightened. If you don't hold it, the lock will fall out, there's nothing to hold it in place.
I'm doing 99% of the work on the pumpkin by myself so I had to figure someway around this.
This is what I came up with. It's really simple. The locks are just short, little pieces of square stock. When the locks are in a vertical position, unless you hold them in place, they'll fall through the hole.
I took my welder and just zapped a little weld bead on one side of the lock.
This little bead will keep the lock from falling through the hole.
Works pretty good and now it only takes one person to install the clamps.
If you ever decide to get rid of the bead you can just grind it off or get some more square stock and make another set without the bead.