UPDATE:  I’ve added some final information to this post …

After a great deal of research, I felt the best option for a bender for my purposes was to build my own.  I quickly settled on Frank Takac’s plans from gotTrikes.com. Frank was great to deal with,  responsive to my email and the plans were  professional with plenty of tips, pics and information.  Frank told me that a 15 year old successfully built one of his benders.  You can see a variety of benders built by purchasers of Frank’s plans at his website.  I can strong recommend these plans if you are considering building your bender.

Frank recently added my project to his website.  You can view it here.

Here’s a few pics of my finished bender:

PREVIOUSLY:

I’ve been slowly building my tube bender.  I followed most of the instructions I purchased (which were great — I’ll write more about that later), but I just couldn’t stand buying new metal when I had so much 1/4 inch angle iron laying around (thank you sis!).  So, I made several modifications based on the metal I had.

Also, during the process of building, I realized I just didn’t care whether the bender looked good (such as grinding welds, sanding it down, etc).  So, it is what it is.  I did have some leftover chrome paint, if not smooth, it is shiny.  I’m just waiting for a couple shafts to arrive in the mail and then I can start bending!