ausyota wrote:I just bought a "Borum" cheap chinese bender.
Cost me a bit over a couple of hundred bucks.
They said they used to have a problem with the crappy dies kinking the pipe but have swapped to large radius dies now that dont.
We had a Dawn die in the shop and puting them side by side they looked almost identical.
I did a test bend with some old galv pipe I had in the shed and it did a beutifull smooth bend with the only problem being the 2 little dints from the rollers.
Is there an easy way to stop that?
Different rollers?
Machined rollers?
Sleeve over pipe?
Paul.
Make new rollers. I tried the sleeve trick and it only seemed to work with lighter wall tube, heavier wall tube the sleeve dented and so did the workpiece.
I used delrin bar stock for the rollers and have a set of rollers particular to each size tube, dawn formers, and a cheapo bow and arrow bender from A Mans Toyshop.
Works well. No denting of the tube from the rollers and the Dawn formers work well, occasional scoring on the side of the bend is their only drawback.
Only complaint is that the frame and baseplate of the bender deforms a little with heavy wall thickness and when doing Carltons trick to get 189 deg bends (the loading on the two rollers is not identical and the base plate cocks over a bit making repeatability an issue)
Bender was ~$300, dawn dies were $90-150 depending on size, Delrin stock ? not much. You will need access to a lathe for the formers, a wood lathe and skilled operator will suffice.
NAM also posted a link to a site with plans for a draw around bender at one stage, can't remeber the name though. Migh be an option for those who can fab.
Cheers
Daryl