A while back I bought the above metal bender, I wanted to bend some brackets for hanging stuff like ladders and tools on my garage wall.
Once I'd got it I tried to figure out how the heck it worked using the manual that came with it. To be fair, the manual looks quite comprehensive, it runs to 48 odd pages and contains quite a lot of info. But it's missing some key detail.
Not being one to give up easily I searched the internet and YouTube and found some manuals for similar equipment, figured out how it worked and made a video
Since then I've had a few comments asking some more questions that weren't directly answered in the video itself so this blog is going to try and answer them, I'll try to keep it updated as more questions come in.
Some info and history
There's many different versions of this tool available. It looks suspiciously like a lot of them all come out of the same factory and are just individually badged per supplier.
Tom T added a comment on the video that seems to support this and adds a bit of history as well as some useful info. I'm hoping he doesn't mind me reproducing the conversation here:
Tom writes: 20+ years ago I bought a compact bender, pedestal ring roller and planetary ring roller from Shop Outfitters in the states. It was all made in the USA, not cheap, but all of it was, and is still, top quality stuff! A handful of years later, the Chinese copied every one of these three products, albeit with much less precision, and now Harbor Freight, Northern Tool, Grizzly etc. all sell clones of S. O.’s compact bender, but much cheaper. The SO benders came with a great instruction BOOK (not pamphlet) that had very detailed instructions including how to bend letters A-Z complete with dimensions! Some of those companies actually even pirated SO’s pages showing those letter patterns, but almost universally left out how to use things like the right angle attachment, the proper orientation of the stop block (it can suddenly break loose and spin violently when under pressure if oriented incorrectly!) etc.. SO also offered a set of scroll bending tools for the compact bender that included scale plastic drawing templates that exactly matched the scrolls produced by the bender! You could sit down and draw out your project to scale and know exactly how long to cut each blank, and what length to bend them to! It infuriated me to see SO get duped so bad, because they made a quality product and made them in the states! HF even copied the scroll bender for a bit, but evidently SO got that stopped. Your video is the first thing I’ve seen that can compare with the original owners manual, and you’ve done a great service to the thousands of people who have bought the knockoffs, but have nothing to refer to! Thanks for making it! Oh, and by the way, SO stopped making the compact bender years ago and moved on to bigger, more costly bending equipment!
I replied with: Tom thank you so much for the huge compliment and the comprehensive history. To be fair, the "manual" on this one does have the pages on the letter making process but that's no damn good when it doesn't explain how to make the thing work!!! Precision definitely isn't something I'd say these later versions are capable of, I have some experience of working industrial kit like press brakes and sheet metal rollers and this thing is a loooooong way from them but for making brackets for stuff in my garage it's adequate. I've seen the scroll bender attachment for sale on ebay and the versions available look even less well made than the bender itself! I'll do a follow up sometime that explains some of the shortcomings of it and if you don't mind I'll mention some of what you've said.
And Tom came back further with: Thats fine! I’ve bent literally thousands of scrolls on mine, with no wear whatsoever on the attachment! SO also sold a scroll extender to make even larger scrolls, and it works equally well. I have used a couple of the knockoff benders and they’re totally adequate for most purposes if the user can figure out how to set it up correctly. One of my projects in the upcoming weeks will be to build an eye bending dog similar to the Hossfeld eye bending dog. If you’ve never seen that attachment, it’s well worth the time to search it on YouTube. I’ve got a Hossfeld #2 with this tooling and it’s probably the most used tool for me! It’s kind of interesting that SO got (understandably) angry when the Chinese copied their design, but in retrospect, SO stole Hossfeld’s design to make theirs! If you want/need pics of any of this stuff, or pages from the SO manual, let me know and I’ll email them. Have a great day!
So I think if you can find an original Shop Outfitters or Hossfeld Hossbender machine it'll be about as good as you can get. Anything else is potentially a copy of dubious quality.
What's the capacity?
According to my manual it's 5/16" x 2" or 8mm x 50mm. I'll state at this point that the biggest I've ever worked on it is 30mm x 3 so I have no experience above that. The manual also says it will bend up to 5/8" or 16mm solid bar, round or square or up to 1/2" rebar. Again I've no experience of this.
Here's a shot of the section in the manual where it deals with capabilities
Will it do precision bending?
Again I'll use the phrase "in my experience", but I'd say no, any attempt at precision has been met with failure in my case. When bending around the round formers the metal "springs" and doesn't follow the former tightly. This means the bend itself ends up bigger than the former radius and further away from the fixed point of the bender. It's not a hug amount but it differs across material sizes. I've got into the habit of doing at least one practice piece first and using that to get my working dimensions. In terms of the sharp angle bender function, I've found it's possible to get that pretty much on the line but were still talking millimetre accuracy rather than thousandth of a millimetre accuracy.
Will it bend square or round tube?
I've not used it for this at all but have some experience of using pipe benders in a previous life and they always seem to have a shaped former that the pipe bends against. This supports the sidewall of the pipe and stops it collapsing. On this specific machine it doesn't come with shaped formers so ~I'd guess the answer is no. However, if you've got access to engineering machinery like a lathe it might be possible to turn up a former that could do it. It will also depend on the wall thickness of the pipe you want to bend.