About a year ago I began looking for a metal bender. Looked everywhere for design ideas, Hossfeld, Diacro, Shop Outfitters, etc. These dang things are expensive. So, I decided to spend about 10 times the equivalent cost in my time designing and fabricating my own bender. The design criteria:
- needs to be tough enough to bend 5/16 x 2 bar
- but have tooling to bend smaller precision pieces
- needs to mount in the receiver tube on the welding table & rotate in all directions horizontal and vertical (see adapter)
- have flexibility to adapt to most any bending requirement
This project was probably one of the more challenging I've done recently. The arms are precision drilled on my Mill allowing a tight fit for the pins and adapter saddles I use for tooling above the arms. The adapter saddles provide a base for an infinite variety of tooling to fit a project. The pins are hardened 1141 steel. Some of the dies are cold roll steel, some hardened. The noses of the tools are case hardened with Casenite. In many ways the tooling has been a design-as-I-go, machined and welded to fit. I'm now trying to figure out how to make a scroll attachment. There is more to this than the photos show. So, if anyone wants more photos, let me know.
- needs to be tough enough to bend 5/16 x 2 bar
- but have tooling to bend smaller precision pieces
- needs to mount in the receiver tube on the welding table & rotate in all directions horizontal and vertical (see adapter)
- have flexibility to adapt to most any bending requirement
This project was probably one of the more challenging I've done recently. The arms are precision drilled on my Mill allowing a tight fit for the pins and adapter saddles I use for tooling above the arms. The adapter saddles provide a base for an infinite variety of tooling to fit a project. The pins are hardened 1141 steel. Some of the dies are cold roll steel, some hardened. The noses of the tools are case hardened with Casenite. In many ways the tooling has been a design-as-I-go, machined and welded to fit. I'm now trying to figure out how to make a scroll attachment. There is more to this than the photos show. So, if anyone wants more photos, let me know.
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