Rangerguru
Bought an X
- Location
- Currently in Afghanistan
Ok, so I found these plans on the internet at www.gottrikes.com The guy's name is Frank and he CAD designed this air/hydraulic tube bender. He sells the plans for around $18 so I decided to build one. I want to buils tube bumpers for my Xterra and including the die and air/hyd cylinder, I have less than $500 in it. I got the 2x2 tubing and plate steel from my steel guy, but with a little effort, I could have probably gotten it a lot cheaper from a scrap yard. He includes two different designs with the plans. One is just for personal use and the other is for the serious tube bender that plans on doing a lot of production work. I bought the 1 5/8ths die because that's what I plan on using on my bumpers, but it's set up to accept many different sizes of dies and it's designed to use the Pro Tools dies. I bought mine from www.tmrcustoms.com because they had the best prices. I got the required pins from www.mcmaster.comHere's what it looks like finished. I'm still going to paint it, but I tried it out and it works great.
Here's the tube that I tried out. I only went to 90 degrees, but it will do 180
Here's the required cylinder. I got it from Harbor Freight.
I built this with just a chop saw, drill press and Lincoln 175 mig welder. For the more advanced design, it's recommended to have a machine shop do the holes as it also requires bushings.
Frank is very helpful and will return emails when sent. He emailed me the plans on a PDF file as well as mailed me a CD. Both are password protected, but he'll email you the password if you decided to build one of these. He also includes the part numbers for the pins, bolts and cylinder.
I'll be starting on my bumpers this week and I'll post photos of my progress in my build thread.
Here's the tube that I tried out. I only went to 90 degrees, but it will do 180
Here's the required cylinder. I got it from Harbor Freight.
I built this with just a chop saw, drill press and Lincoln 175 mig welder. For the more advanced design, it's recommended to have a machine shop do the holes as it also requires bushings.
Frank is very helpful and will return emails when sent. He emailed me the plans on a PDF file as well as mailed me a CD. Both are password protected, but he'll email you the password if you decided to build one of these. He also includes the part numbers for the pins, bolts and cylinder.
I'll be starting on my bumpers this week and I'll post photos of my progress in my build thread.
What diameter and wall thickness is the tubing you did the test run on? Did you use any sort of lube on the tubing?
