SteelBender

This has been a real honeymoon style of a week here in TX.  The sun stays up late, the temperature is absolutely perfect (t-shirt in the shop is just right even until 11:00pm) and there are no mosquitos.  Perhaps it feels so good because I know 2 out of those 3 things are going to change drastically over the next month or two.  The result of this awesome weather is that I have been having some real productive time in the shop.  Besides getting the metro project well on it's way (just waiting on me to buy a new starter for it now,) I also got the litter vacuum all wired up with its safety interlock switches (so that if you partially disassemble it by removing the bag or the nozzle while the engine is running, it will kill the engine) and the shop is partially cleaned/organized enough that I have room to work.

Tonight was metal night and I finished the work on my steel bender.  Here's the background: I need a large radius (like 15") bender to bend 1" square tubing to replace some rusted out "bows" on the top of my stock trailer.  I tried farming the work out and the shop totally botched the job and I am stuck doing it myself.  That is a fairly relaxed bend, but the metal shop only had 14 gauge stock, so although that is comparitively pretty thin, it makes for a very stout 1" square tube.  My first attempt at a bender resulted in a slightly bent tube and very bent bender.

I spent about 3 hours shaping and fitting reinforcements onto the bender to make it stronger than the tubing and I borrowed a small propane torch from good ol' pops for a little extra persuasion on the metal.  It worked!  After a whole evening in the shop, I now have a single 90 degree radius!

OK - now for the hard part - to perfectly measure the other end to know where to start the second bend.  I'm off to Pirate4X4 to try to figure out how to do that with their awesome tutorials.