More-months-than-I-care-to-think-about ago (about seven months I think), I bought a cheap Affordable Bender. When it arrived, I was less than impressed with the collar (see this post). So, I called them, only to learn that the collar was designed that way and should work fine (I believe they told me “Billions” of bends have been done with Affordable Benders, or something like that).

So, I decided to test the bender before sending it back; I hadn’t expected to wait 7 months to test it!

Yesterday, I mounted it to my metal work table and tested it with a 90 degree bend, one of two I need for the racer’s main loop (it’s the most difficult bend of the entire roll cage). The bender comes with a 90 degree die, so I was a little worried wether the bender would do a 90 degree bend.

First off, it didn’t take me long to miss my old bender, the one I built from plans: http://www.ewillys.com/2009/10/08/my-tube-bender-almost-done/. But, since I couldn’t access my plan (lock PDF with no password and the author of the PDF wouldn’t answer my emails), I had to buy this AFF bender.

Here are the results of the 90 degree bend .. as you can see, it stops short of a 90 degree bend:

Ugh .. what It meant is that I had to force the 15′ tube through the collar a few inches so I could add an additional bend. While that worked, I bent it too far (I misread my level .. it went to 90 degrees which I missed, then started down to 88, so I thought it was at 88 and needed to go to 90. UGH .. had to start over).

Eventually, I got the hang of how to do a 90 degree bend with this and managed to create the loop below.

This pic shows the first 90 finished and I’m starting on the second.

This shows the second 90 done. That is all the 90s I need, so the rest of the bends should be much easier.

I still have two more bends on this loop (the bars are parallel, though don’t look that way in the pics), which I’ll complete tomorrow.