I'm looking to invest in a pipe bender for exhaust and intake work. I'll be using SS for the headers and exhaust and aluminum for the intake pieces.

My question is which type of bender is a good compromise between affordability and quality? I've seen some good non-mandrel benders that seem to not crimp the pipe. Is that because the pipe is too thick in the examples?

If a mandrel bender is my only option, please recommend a good company or product. This will be for small to moderate production

 

a non-mandrel bent exhaust is not going to get you much business in the aftermarket world. and mandrel benders are really expensive. your best bet is to buy a bunch of prebent pieces, and get good at fitting them together.

 

non-mandrel bent exhaust suck. most mandrel benders are like 15-20 feet long and like $20,000. like said before perfect your pipe fitting skills and buy prebent pieces to weld together.

to give you an idea of its size, this is a mandrel bender for up to 3" pipe

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by dbiker207 &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">non-mandrel bent exhaust suck. most mandrel benders are like 15-20 feet long and like $20,000. like said before perfect your pipe fitting skills and buy prebent pieces to weld together.

to give you an idea of its size, this is a mandrel bender for up to 3" pipe
</TD></TR></TABLE>

$20,000 will not get you a mandrel bender like that, the bender you have pictured is around $120,000.

A good manual machine will run at least 35k, but here is the fun part... tooling. For each size you want to bend add another 5 to 7k.

 

Ok then. Pre-bent pieces it is. I really need to hit that lottery...

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by danielm3 &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">$20,000 will not get you a mandrel bender like that, the bender you have pictured is around $120,000.

A good manual machine will run at least 35k, but here is the fun part... tooling. For each size you want to bend add another 5 to 7k. </TD></TR></TABLE>

PM'd ya

 

look for used equiptment! I just found a nice one for 9,000, now I'm tring to talk my boss into it forthe new year. I talked him in to the icengineworks header system and a tubing roller but I think I will have a hard sell with this one because we don't build that many exhaust systems.

 

you'd be surprised how many people will pay out the *** for non-mandrel bent pipe.

the biggest problem with mandrel bent exhaust systems is that unless you cnc it for each vehicle for a precise fit, you are stuck doing the cut & weld ****, that's fine for high dollar systems where you can actually charge out enough to cover your welding & fitup time.

a decent radius bender is still around $20k including tooling, and if you're good at it you can make radius bends that will be very very close to the performance of a mandrel system.

my dad is a expletiveing artist with his radius bender, the only really bad ones are the tight radius 90's where you have to make an S, that's expletiveing awful.

 

here is my paper weight i boughty 7 months ago.. i still can't afford to buy tooling yet.. but one day