BESSEYSVH 400XL Wood Flooring Strap Clamp, 25 ft (SVH400XL)

Works great

Installing pine flooring with my son. Thought these would be a handy backup and got two. We ended up needing them for any board longer than a few feet. Wish I'd bought at least another one. It was a lifesaver.

First time flooring…installed 85x19mm Kwila/Merbau (Hardwood T&G) on my own build, over a vapour-stop prepared concrete foundation. I am a carpenter, but on clients builds I have always left flooring to our expert contractors. These strap clamps enabled me to compress all micro gaps and board warps, whilst the adhesive cured. You need to weigh down the boards especially where the clamp ends attach to the outside flooring edges. In areas where I ran out of clamps (I only ordered four), I used a strap clamp then wedged the area to enable me to use the clamp elsewhere. The 7m tape is a blessing, as the flooring laid was of considerable size…have ordered another four for my next build. Brilliant clamps!

I ended up buying 5 of these for my DIY project. At first I thought, I was wasting my money spending $200 on straps, when I all need to do is make sure I use my pry bar and tapping block. I was almost getting ready to cancel my purchase.I am glad I didn't. Most modern manufacturing processes have too much deviation. For most part flooring is cut square, and if you are installing a small room the small deviations in the floors won't matter. But if you are laying down a floor on a large area, then a millimeter here and there starts to add up. The next thing you know, by the time you start reaching the latter rows, you may notice things are no longer on a true line or truly square. The straps are great, because once you squeeze the rows in , everything starts to line up again. Small little gaps that I might not have visibly noticed, get squeezed in.If I hadn't bought these straps, I suspect some of my rows would have been misaligned in my larger rooms. These are worth every penny, but make sure you buy the 400XL series and not the standard 400 series. The 12 foot straps are too short my needs, I really need the 25 foot straps found with the XL series.On a side note, if you are a woodworker, you know the company "Bessey" I wouldn't buy the off name straps, I prefer to use Bessey for a long term investment like floors.

I'm a 63 year old general contractor. I use a lot of Bessey clamps for everything from framing to cabinetmaking so it was easy to trust that these clamps would be the quality I expected. I need to make a floating floor from a high quality engineered flooring product from Hurst. The installation required glue in the grooves and clamping pressure. Most modern flooring is cheap click and run strips with dubious longevity. Click laminate and engineered flooring products tend to squeak and fail often. These clamps allowed me to make a continuous slab of floating wood over concrete that will not squeak and heave. The thumbscrews did not work well for spacers so I used a box full of 2"x2"x .5" plywood scraps. I bought ten clamps to do about 1400 sq. ft. The clamps are easy to release and move as you work. The length of the straps make it easy to build wide slabs. The result was a very nice floor with tight joints. They made it easy to lay some very expensive flooring carefully and efficiently. The flooring that I chose would have been much harder to do right without these clamps. It was well worth the expense considering I spent over 7K for the flooring material. I wish I had them long ago because they would have been handy for T&G ceiling and wall paneling too.

I wanted a decent quality ratchet clamp to install T&G plank flooring tightly without having to resort to makeshift wood wedges. This clamp is clearly designed for that purpose, since the illustrations in the set- up guide show the clamping of tongued and grooved pieces. But while one clamp plate fits neatly into the grooved side of the board, the opposing plate bites the tongue side of the board in the MIDDLE of the tongue, rather than under the tongue. The plate clamp for the tongue side, IMO, should grab under the tongue and make contact below it. Biting into the middle of the tongue invites splitting the wood when force is applied since the clamp plate is only 4 inches wide, and the metal hitting the wood is only about 1/8th inch thick). In other words, the metal plate clamps should have two different configurations- one grabbing into the groove, the other grabbing under the tongue. I had been tempted to buy the much cheaper $12 version of this tool since the $50 for a simple ratchet clamp seemed awfully high, but there were some negative reviews that the ratchets on the cheap models had issues. While I have just started using the Bessey, I can't comment on how long it will last. However, in terms of price justification for the mechanism involved, the $50 price of this Bessey seems exorbitant. I just bought a Porter Cable belt sander for around $70. Granted, the sander was made in China, and this Bessey clamp was made in Germany. But the clamp is not an example of high end engineering. It's a ratchet with two plate clamps attached by 25 feet of webbed nylon strap! So, does it work? Yes, sort of. Was it worth the cost? No. Frankly, the only reason I haven't returned it is because I wanted it quickly and paid for two day shipping, and won't get refunded for that!

It's pretty good. I also believe the quality of flooring you use has a lot to do with this tool's performance. It does what it's supposed to. I wish the profile for the static claw was a little lower to get under baseboards more easily but overall it's much easier than using a block and hammer. It'd get 5 stars of it had the aforementioned lower profile.