Starting the bender

No, no, not him. One of these...


From Frank at Takac's Cycles In the never ending quest for more tools, I decided to build my own tubing bender. Having looked around and seen how expensive buying one was, I luckily stumbled upon Frank's site and plans for his bender at Takacs Cycles. So I ordered up the plans, and contemplated how to drill all the required holes for the upright and swingarm. Luckily through Danielle and Soren, we befriended Caz and the crew at Caztek. And Caz offered the use of their shop to help the team. So we could use the band saw to easily cut through the 5/8" and 1/2" thick plate. Like buttah...

They even let me make make a mess on the layout table. But I did clean it up.

Here's Matt, one of the Caztek guys, on the Bridgeport drilling all the holes in the swing arm. Look at that concentration!

Here's the day's progress. Not as much as I hoped for, but not from a lack of trying. Unfortunately I ran into issues getting all the steel we needed. It started off as anger at Discount Steel for taking FOREVER (two days) to cut my steel, when it turned out to be because they were out of material. And low and behold, their archaic inventory management system that said they had enough material for my order, was wrong, and the value was "low enough" to mean they had zero. So what started off as anger for their lack of customer service and finishing my order, turned out to be the result of an old computer system. Maybe someday they'll fix that. But at least tomorrow my big order of steel through Jeremy should here, and hopefully I'll have more steel then I know what to do with...literally, I'm not sure where I'm going to store it all. Oh, back to the pic above, you can see the awesomely machined swingarms, and some other cut steel pieces. We got a lot of little stuff done, but will need another night or two this week to finish cutting all the holes. Apparently cutting 1.375" holes with a boring bar in 0.020" passes takes awhile when your biggest drill is around an 1.0". Harbor Freight was also out of stock of the hydraulic ram, but should have more on Tuesday. And my 1.75" die from Pro-Tools should be here Wednesday. Everything else from McMaster-Carr already showed up.

And this is some fun with a flamethrower! Stopped the open house at the Hack Factory with Caz as he and the crew showed off their flamethrower, pulse jet engine (not running...BOOOOOOOOO), and their t-shirt launcher. Lots of other cool stuff there as well from other people, but not as cool as a flamethrower. Step 2 for the project I believe is going to use higher pressure for a bigger flame. I think Soren and I need to build something to compete with Caz. If only we could write it off as a business project.