AndyStobbs
Member
- Messages
- 2,475
- Location
- North West England
Hi all, today I started putting together my rotary draw bender, or so I thought anyway. I at least wanted to get 6 bends and after that I wasn't fused if it fell apart. Well I got no bends at all, and very little to show for 11 hours work.
Its now clear to me that there is no short cut to rotary draw bending, no such thing as 'it'll only need to do a few bends' , if the machine is capable of turning out just one nice bend, it'll will go on to do a hundred more I now think. So back to the original question, I now need to make the dies. I have a small Harrison lathe L5A and that's about it so far as machine tools go. The die for bending the 44.5 mm tube needs to be made on a 4D CLR, as does the wiper die, clamp die, and pressure die. The clamp I reckon I can get with the boring bar, ditto on.the pressure though I'm limited on length.
I have a rudimentary milling set up on the lathe, and will happily adapt further as rqd, if needs be. So what's the best was to machine a semicirular groove of approx 22mm radius into a lump of steel 60mm wide and approx 170mm diameter?
Thanks in advance...
Its now clear to me that there is no short cut to rotary draw bending, no such thing as 'it'll only need to do a few bends' , if the machine is capable of turning out just one nice bend, it'll will go on to do a hundred more I now think. So back to the original question, I now need to make the dies. I have a small Harrison lathe L5A and that's about it so far as machine tools go. The die for bending the 44.5 mm tube needs to be made on a 4D CLR, as does the wiper die, clamp die, and pressure die. The clamp I reckon I can get with the boring bar, ditto on.the pressure though I'm limited on length.
I have a rudimentary milling set up on the lathe, and will happily adapt further as rqd, if needs be. So what's the best was to machine a semicirular groove of approx 22mm radius into a lump of steel 60mm wide and approx 170mm diameter?
Thanks in advance...