Tube Bender

[rkirk77]

Any suggestion on a good tube bender for doing fuselage, stab parts.. etc.

[robert l]

What are you bending, 4130, aluminum or ? I have seen some pretty simple homemade ones on the net.
Bob

[rkirk77]

Yes 4130 tubing.. forgot to put that in the post. lol

[2ndsegment]

Start with not doing this. Do not heat the tubing, ever. Next notice that way back some applications did braze malleable iron fixtures at junctions and the Hurricane used bolted stainless steel joint elements to avoid welding in Empire locations during WW-II. Read up on the Stinson application that tried heat treating 4130 chrome-moly. My experience choosing a tube bender examined plumbing pipe, electrical conduit and finally a hydraulic tube bender where I had to wait a year for the experts to get the correct mandrels for the size tubing I wanted bent. Now tell me about the Piper Cub frame that was going to get a Corvair engine with Warner Velvet Drive I met in 1964 in the workshop of a GM test driver. He was an expert arc welder and understood eutectic rod which was new for cast iron at that time. Move on to my motorcycle dealer who was an expert TIG welder and did contract work on cracked Toyota aluminum heads. He unbent the Reynold 530 large diameter backbone and braze welded doublers to the twin downtubes on my Norton motorcycle frame after I crashed it on a deep hard edged trench made by a bulldozer. 4130 is a buzz word