What kind of Pipe Bender?

[Bob the Frog]

I'm aiming to build my own cage before too long, and I'm wondering what's best when it comes to bending 44 and 38mm CDS.

The two options as far as I know are

1. "Rotary Draw" bender, which requires expensive dies, (the framing and hydraulics I can build myself with no problem), but I'm looking at £200 per dimension...

2. "Press Bending" which usually sees a hydraulic jack and a set of dies for far cheaper.

Pros/Cons

With Press bending - if you want a good result - you have to pack the tube with sand (PITA) but given that it comes with a huge range of dies maybe that's something I can live with. The added joy of putting the press tool in the center of where you want your bend seems to make life easy.

With a Rotary Draw Bender you don't need to piss about with sand, but the tooling cost is high, and the calculation of bend start/end is a bit of a bugger to get right.

At the moment I'm tending to lean towards a hefty press-type bender - for the 6 or so decent bends I need I can live with sand - and with all the other dies I have a good use for it in the future.

What do you guys recommend?

Cheers

/Nick



Vids:
Rotary Draw bending: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFs4iUxpfzY&NR=1&feature=fvwp
Press type bending with sand fill: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWT3N3m4bE4&feature=related

 

[keirravn]

 

[f0xy]

The 'best' way...

 

[Bob the Frog]

Sow what you're saying Foxy is... pay someone else a lot more than it'd cost me to make a pipe bender, and get them to do it?

A tempting option for some maybe, but not for me - :headno:

 

[f0xy]

Surely it would be cheaper for you to buy a pre-fabbed cage in pieces and have it shipped (CustomCages, OMP, Sparco) to yourself, and it would still probably end up being cheaper than buying a machine, dies, etc?

I bought the basic 'bent' bars (Hoop, A Pillars, Screen Bar, etc) for my cage from CustomCages, then the rest of it I made myself as its all from straight bar

 

[Bob the Frog]

I totally agree on principle, but the problem here is the local regs.

The gist of it is somewhere along the lines of "If you can get your fingers between the A or B pillars and the cage, it's considered to be a bad fit and a hazard in a crash". - I consider it to be an excuse to knock out a cage that's a little bit anal in the attention to detail.

Problem is that I'm rarely happy with the quality of other people's work, and given that I can get a press bender for around £100 or so (less than it costs to ship cages from the UK) or build a scroll/draw bender for £200 then I'll have the tool for other jobs too, and be able to make a cage that fits like a charm. I love gussets: but the reality is that a shoe-horned fit means that they should be tiny - the visibility should be better, and the weight should be lower.

"Dash dodging" cages wind me up, and I'm also looking at the possibility of going though the bulkhead to the front turrets - there's going to be a fair bit of fiddling, pondering and swearing before I've got it right, so in reality, ordering cage components is most likely going to lead to a giant balls-up and even more swearing on my part...

I'm not exactly in a shoe-string budget, but I do want to save money where possible, and then maybe I can justify some fap-tastic AST's...

 

[f0xy]

Id go for a rotary type bender then for sure!

 

[Bob the Frog]

For Sure yah? FWIW, I think you're right.

I'll look into it some more. It mostly depends upon what sizes of CDS I can get my hands on. Most press benders are in Imperial sizes, whereas the more pricey dies for the rotaries are in metric equivalents. If I can get 40mm CDS then I'll be laughing. :approve: