Anyone ever use a band clamp or strap clamp to glue a neck on? My son's class is going to assemble a bunch of Grizzly kits and their instructions call for a band clamp to hold the neck on during gluing. I have plenty of these, so it would be ideal but I didn't want to do it if anyone was having any sort of problem using them in this way.
I would be concerned about the longitudinal stability of the body. And I do wonder what advantage you would get from strap clamping. Isn't heel->body layer->heelblock the decisive bond?
My neck heel cheek was machined well and matched the body. Watch the staples on the body. Mine were a little proud and needed filing flush. Establishing a centerline on the neck is a challenge. I used dividers and trialed and errorred until I got it close enough.
To do the glue-up, I used a heavy weight on the body to hold it in place (top side down) on a laminate countertop and another weight on the neck (face down) to keep it flat and on the same plane as the body. I then used a few big rubber bands to hold the neck heel cheek tight to the body along with some masking tape to keep it from shifting off the center line. A couple of brads hammered into the neck block and clipped off ~1/32" proud would help hold it steady and is what I would suggest you do for your kids. (The same thing would help on the fingerboard attachment too. Mine shifted slightly with Timbuck's electrical tape wrap technique. Probably didn't hold my mouth correctly when I did it)
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