you guys are all fancy and whatnot... 
tape measure and angle finder baby!
tape measure and angle finder baby!
CK5
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Bender mounting ** UPDATE 8-04** Mounted and Bending!
- Thread starter MTBLAZER89
- Start date
Oh yeah, I did it that way for quite a while. I'm not saying you have to have Bend tech to build a cage or bend tube, but it sure does make life easier. Plus it's just plain cool to see exactly what you're building before you cut or bend a single piece of tube.
you guys are all fancy and whatnot...
tape measure and angle finder baby!
.
Whats all this talk about bend offset? Does it have to do with where the bend starts and stops? Purpose being so you can determine the length of tube you need between bends? I dont know so sorry for the stupid questions. I read the pirate bending tube 101 and I think I can get the hang of it but it is honestly a little daunting. I just dont know what to do other then just start making a bunch of scrap tube with incorrect bends. That and it takes a little artistry to make your fabrication parts look nice and not goofey. I am going to try simple at first, some shock hoops with an engine brace. Then bumpers, cages, oh my, this is a little scary. To me regearing diffs was easy but not so much this.
I started the same way....with a manual Pro-Tools bender bolted to the floor and a hardcopy of TubeBending 101 from Pirate sitting on the workbench. For single-axis bends (shock hoops, b-pillars, etc) the chalk-on-the-floor thing works fine, but as soon as you start getting into multi-axis bends you'll find that things get complicated in a hurry, your head will start to hurt and the scrap pile of waste tubing will get LARGE.
One method I used with good success on multiaxis bends was to build sleeves into the straight sections between the bends..... each individual bend is pretty easy to figure out, and with the ability to rotate each bend (using the sleeve) you can get the final part to fit pretty well. Once it's all positioned, I would just puddle up the plug welds, and do a nice hot weld to joint the two tubes and the inner sleeve together. It's stronger than a single thickness of tubing when you do it correctly so it's not a strength or safety issue.The emergence of the BendTech software just makes the whole process a lot simpler and faster (once you're calibrated and learn the software)....my setup has evolved to a hydraulic bender, a degree ring and a copy of BendTech PRO. I can design and build much more sophisticated-looking parts now, minimize my waste cuts to almost nothing and get a more professional result a lot quicker.
You don't HAVE to own the software as long as you're willing to spend a lot more of your own time figuring things out getting the fitments right....over time, if you find that you are doing a lot of tubework you'll probably end up owning a copy of the BendTech software.
kevin400ex
1/2 ton status
heres how my bender is mounted 
