I have been talking to Tony Spezio about pressing nodes and the Waara node press.  As with Tony I agree that displacing the nodes is a easy and quick method.  Then again the Waara press is nice because you don't have to have a vice to crush the nodes.  The new found method that Tony uses by putting a notched plate in the jaw of your vice and placing the node ridge in that notch as you press the node.  Then filing the small ridge off once you have pressed the node you are left with is a small area has been worked on.  Seeing his rods sure makes a believer out of me, for my nodes were never that small after I filed them down. So it started me thinking (and sometime I think this is dangerous) and my designing side of my brain kicked in.  Why not have the best of both worlds.  So I took the basic idea of the Waara Node press and combined it with the notched plate idea and came up with this new contraption.

The details of this handy tool are as follow.  First the tool was made from a two pieces of steel welded together.  The first piece was 1/4 inch thick 2 x 2 angle iron.  The second, was a piece of 1/4 thick bar that measures approx. 2 1/4 x 7 1/2 inches. There were several factors why I chose this heavy of steel but I don't need to go through all that right now.  I mounted the toggle clamp on the base and put some 1/4" spacers under the clamp to put the center line of the clamp ram a tad bit higher as opposed to mounting it flush on the base.  The clamp ram in my machine is a bit different than the original design because I found out that tack welding a bolt to the face plate (a 1" x 1" x 1/4" piece of steel) was a little hard to keep everything square and plum.  So the welder opted to drill a hole and tap it through the plate and weld the all thread on the face and then hitting the face with a grinder or belt sander to make it flush again.  Then the clamp ram was taken to the end mill and a 1/8" wide and 1/16" deep grove down the center of the face plate was milled.

So that is it in a nut shell.  Personally I didn't do all the welding and stuff, that is were I sweet talked a few of the guys at my work to do that for me.  I just designed it and made the drawings for them, being that I am a draftsman by trade makes that part of the job easy.  It just took me working during one of my lunches to create the drawings.

The few scrap nodes that I have press with this machine sure look nice. Once I got done all I had was an area of about 1/4" that was touched by the file and a flat section of cane.  I am looking forward to use this on the next rod that I am starting on in the next month or so.