bender recomendations

[dannyp]

have recently decided i want to justify buying a pipe bender but have a horrible feeling it's not going to be cheep.

I want to be abel to bend pipe for makeing the odd rollcage and set of railings but also exhaust manifolds. e looking at working with anything upto 2 1/2 " possobly 3" but thats not a must fed up of paying £7 a bend and haveing to wait for them

any suggestions ?

 

[Shox Dr]

3inch is a big tube. exhaust very hard to bend with out a mandrel. Protools brute will go 3" expect to 2.5k set up with a few dies

 

[dannyp]

3 inch would be nice to do for downpipes on tubo cars but largest i normaly use is 2.5"

i keep hearing about these mandrels, is it possible to economicly buy a mandrel or make one and retrofit it to a rotary draw bender or would i be best off building my own bending machene

 

[Baloo]

hi
not sure how easy it would be to make a mandrel bender, if l understand it right that is, to stop the wall collapsing you insert something up the inside of the tube before bending, something being a string of steel tennis balls connected together ?? the problem would come in retracting them which would l guess have to be powered, if you were bending in the middle of a 12' length of tube it would make to retraction system pretty long, and l guess you would have to machine up mandrel for every dia and every gauge of tube you wish to bend ? sounds pricey

Andy

 

[Shox Dr]

Very true baloo. Althought you could use something like dry sand or better still one of the specialist products

 

[german8rcoupe]

One of my customers has a company that make underwater aerobic machines. They are all stainless tubing. They used to send it out to be bent but ended up buying the machine. It was about 50k. Bends were perfect with no wall deformation at all.

For ss exhausts, I always buy bends and tig 'em up.

 

[Windy Miller]

Maybe this is not the way to go for the OP, but there is a guy on YouTube that made his own mandrel bender. Fair enough it was a bit of a Heath Robinson creation, but the idea is sound, and it did actually work. With some refinement it could be quite a handy tool.

Search on YouTube for timmytenbikes, or Blackjack's workshop - He has named the bender videos Random1, Random2, etc.

I'm sure there will be a few raised eyebrows at some of his techniques, but he certainly gets things done!

Didn't he used to come on here sometimes?

 

[Baloo]

this one perhaps ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eofUqgM3FNA&list=UUGwEI_g2v8x06CFltaKsxWA&index=2&feature=plcp

 

[Windy Miller]

Yep that's the one!

 

[Baloo]

well it bends ok what can you say

 

[Baloo]

ok to much bender talk, l will go and take some pics of the bender l have just built and post them up

 

[Shox Dr]

Heehee about time

 

[dannyp]

think i need to make a shopping list.

and make one looking at whats out there and prices

 

[PhillipM]

We've just splashed out on a new rotary draw bender that'll do up to 2.5" tube for much the same purpose as yourself, ended up about 11k by the time you've done with dies and we haven't got the larger dies yet...

 

[seanc]

Theres a reason mandrel bends are expensive to buy. The machines cost a fortune, You would need to be doing alot of work with it to make it financially viable to own one

 

[dannyp]

i can easy spend £4-500 a time on bends when doing intresting exhausts. if i ask for multipul bends in one length they get it wrong and charge even more. never had any discount yet hence thinking about buying a machene.

as for cages atm i think a rotary draw bender would be optimal and i wouldnt need meany dies

 

[hotrodder]

For 3" 16swg or even 2mm wall stainless 2D bends i would think you'll be well into the realm of needing wiper dies as well as a (probably) segmented ball type mandrel. Might not be the reason behind the wrinkling that occured in Blackjack's video but wiper dies are used to 'smooth' out that wrinkle at the bend tangent. It's to do with wall factor amongst others, an article here... http://www.summo.com/tube.pdf explains in more depth. 3" 16swg has a wall factor of 50!

A mate of mine started a custom exhaust shop 5 or 6 years ago (sold the machine and moved on after a couple of years). He looked long and hard atmandrel bending kit and passed. It wasn't just down to capital cost but usability for one off type work- at the time dropping from 60+ grand and up on used kit wouldn't have got anything really suitable. I forget all his reasoning but the list was pretty long and was to do with set up time, tooling changes, versatility etc and for manifolds and the like you still have to cut everything up and weld it up a lot of the time because you physically can't nest the bends close enough. His solution was 15 odd grands worth of Pearson (might have got price/make wrong) that includes swaging and flaring stations and when that didn't cut it (quality/customer request, bend radius etc) using pre formed mandrel bends.

 

[dannyp]

ok so i need a bit of a rethink.

how dose this sound for an idea, if i bought somethink like the jd2 rotary draw bender for doing cage tubes, and sand filled exhaust tube for bending in it.

and i'll just have to keep on buying predone bends for the fancy stuff

 

[Shox Dr]

Is there an echo in here

 

[dannyp]

there are a lot of pipe bending related threads about, just trying to extract and confirm the infomation i want / need.

have absolutly no idea if the sand filling will work as never tryed it.

in the prosses of dragging an old JCB into the workshop to cut up so won't be short of bits if end up makeing a hydralic bender.

tryede to have crimbo off, got to bored so it was ether into the workshop or blow up belgum