i was wondering if it is possible to make a bender from scatch with like hydralic pumps or something, or does any know any good places, i need to bend like 3in diameter steal pipes

 

If you spend hours investigating the types of benders, you will end up at a dead end...

In order to bend what you want, you would have to pay about $70k for a mandrel bender. To reproduce it....well, if you're asking, you can't do it. No offense...just that if you were an industrial or mechanical engineeer with ability to design and produce such a complex machine, you'd already have this knowledge.

I was wanting a bender, and discovered that even a $6k rotary draw bender will change the diameter of the tube when bending. It's good for roll cages, but nothing like intake or exhaust piping. Definitely not good for headers.

The best option is to buy the bends. That's why there's so many people buying bends.

 

well im building a bike and could i like cut where the bend would be and then weld it at an angle?

 

Ok. For building a bike frame, you will likely be using PIPE, which you can probably bend with a pretty cheap bender from Harbor Freight. Or if you want something a bit nicer, look into the JD2 benders. There's other brands that are a bit cheaper, but the same design.

Forget most of what I said in my first post about mandrel stuff...as you don't need that for a bike frame.

 

We use the JD2 Model 3 and the shop and it works great.

 

Tony do you guys use the Hydraulic with it? of is it manual. Im gonna be ordering mine on monday so I was wondering if the hydraulic conversion is worth the money.

 

We don't have the hydraulic option, we're cheap. lol I think it would be great to have, but the manual does the job fine. Make sure you get the "anti springback bar". It's hard to explain how it works, but you'll need it, it'll save alot of time with chromoly.

 

Sounds good thanks for the advise.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by tony1 &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">We use the JD2 Model 3 and the shop and it works great. </TD></TR></TABLE>

max bend is 180 right?

is there any small amount or crushing at that point?


Modified by dfoxengr at 9:39 PM 3/25/2006

 

tony1 - that's the bender i'm going to buy. looks the goods, esp for rollcage fabrication.

i was kind of hoping that it would work on exhaust piping with the use of a mandrel, but they havent got back to me

 

it wouldnt work. real madrel benders are over ~20K for a decent one.

 

but all a "mandrel" bender is really doing is using a mandrel inside of the pipe when it's being bent as far as i know... those expensive ones are just automated so the mandrel stays in the right position all the time

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by dfoxengr &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">max bend is 180 right?

is there any small amount or crushing at that point</TD></TR></TABLE>


Modified by dfoxengr at 9:38 PM 3/25/2006