Keith Clark worked at John Deere Dubuque Works, the heavy equipment plant north of town, before he started building clamps in his own garage around 1974. Roughly two decades later, he moved production into a building at the city’s North End, and Dubuque Clamp Works has operated there ever since.
The clamps are the kind of thing most people never think about, yet every woodworker owns one. Wooden handscrews do work that no metal clamp can. Because each jaw adjusts independently, they can grip even tapered and irregular stock without marring it, and can be locked into a bench vise to hold an awkward piece at a workable angle. Infinity Cutting Tools, which stocks the line, specifies oil-treated hard maple jaws for “prolonged life, check resistance, and durability,” specifying that they are “made to last for generations,” and cold-drawn carbon steel spindles and swivel nuts for “ultra-smooth operation.” The shop also builds aluminum bar clamps built from extruded aircraft aluminum and injection-molded aluminum alloys, “making them lightweight yet extremely rigid,” with a “wing” knob that can be turned to apply up to 1,000 pounds of clamping pressure.
Bloomberg reported that roughly 90 percent of the shop’s output was specialized clamps for holding wood, made using about 50 machines, and used for products ranging across cabinets, countertops, and even guitars. Clark told the Telegraph Herald in 2014 that the company turns out around $500,000 worth of clamps per year and sells to customers large and small across the country, naming Craftsman tools and Gibson guitars among them. “I’ve sold them to industrial arts divisions all over the United States,” he described, as well as internally, to customers in countries including Germany and South Korea. He runs it with his wife, Edna, and three employees, and called it his “little cottage business.”
Then the industry around it thinned out. On May 19, 2016, the Adjustable Clamp Company of Chicago, which did business as Pony Tools and made Jorgensen clamps, told its employees it was suspending operations after 113 years, in a statement chairman Doug Holman sent by email. Woodworker’s Journal reported that Holman’s great-great-grandmother, Adele V. Holman, founded the firm in 1903, and that it began by making wood handscrews based on a design by cabinetmaker Hans Jorgensen. The brands did not die. They moved. The Made-in-Chicago Museum documented that the revived Pony and Jorgensen lines are manufactured by Hangzhou GreatStar Industrial of China and distributed in the United States by Arrow Fastener out of New Jersey. Infinity Tools now tells customers, “As far as we know, Dubuque Clamp Works is now the only company in the U.S. making handscrews.”
Video Courtesy Infinity Cutting Tools
Being what is left has not made the shop bigger. The Clarks told the Telegraph Herald in 2014 that they turned down “several million dollars a year” in business because they preferred their current pace of life. They launched a website one year and took it down after orders arrived from around the globe. “Anybody calls, I tell them ‘No.’ We don’t want to change. We want to be small,” Edna said. Clark elaborated to Bloomberg in 2017 that he turned away new orders partly because so much of the supply chain he depended on had moved abroad, with rivets and springs taking weeks to arrive, so he often ended up machining his own. “That’s the reason it’s going to be hard for manufacturing to come back,” he explained. “You need all these sundry businesses to be here.”
The company’s clamps are slightly more expensive than mass-produced products made abroad using cheaper and less durable materials. In contrast, at Dubuque Clamp Works, the quality is guaranteed. “If a clamp isn’t perfect, it doesn’t go out. We just throw it away. If anybody breaks a part, we just replace it, no questions asked,” Clark told Bloomberg. When reviewing the company’s products on YouTube, James Hamilton, whose “Stumpy Nubs” Woodworkers Community has more than 1 million subscribers on the platform, said, “There’s a reason Keith and Edna’s clamps are still the best despite all the efforts to copy their success over the years.”
Lee Richmond, who founded the woodworking dealer The Best Things in Virginia and appraises antique tools on the PBS series Antiques Roadshow, told the Telegraph Herald that he sold hundreds of Dubuque clamps every week in his retail store and used them at home. “They’re one of the companies that’s stayed true to the values of high-quality manufacturing in the U.S. While their products aren’t the cheapest, they are the very best, and people with taste buy them,” he said. He added, “Keith and Edna refuse to compromise on quality. Dubuque clamps will last generations. They’re that kind of quality. Plus they’re quality people to deal with.”
Video Courtesy Stumpy Nubs (James Hamilton)
The same instinct shows up in how the shop runs. The Telegraph Herald reported that the vent pulling sawdust from the air feeds it into a container, and that Keith pressed that sawdust into small packs of wood product he burned to heat the building. Nothing bought, nothing hauled off.
This dedication to quality is also why a small shop in northeast Iowa outlasted a competitor with 113 years behind it, and why Dubuque Iowa Works is still finding a market for its products more than 50 years in.
