how to bend a triangular handle?

If you are making only one or two, you can hammer some nails in a piece of wood where the bends are to be made, then heat the bend area to white hot, lay it in your jig and make the bends one at a time allowing the previous bend to cool so it will harden and not give when you do the next bend.

If you are to make a dozen or more, get hold of scrap aluminum plate, drill your holes and dowel them with pins of the radius ideal for your project and do the same as above.

If you are to make them in the hundreds then use the above jig but heat the whole end of the rod in a fire-brick kiln powered by an LP torch until the whole part of the rod to be bent is near white hot, and back up the bending with a brake of some kind to keep the bend from ballooning out. Then quench. If you use low carbon steel you should not have to worry about brittleness nor drawing for tempering.

Hope this helps.

Wayne

Oops, I should have mentioned I am planning on bending them cold using a clone of a Hossfeld (the dreaded HF bender).

Grant

Wayne Lundberg wrote:

]

I would bend the last one first, the second one second and the first one last. The reasoning being so that I can get the equilateral triangle at least symmetrical, if not equilateral, by trimming the length of the last leg and/or re-positioning the first bend to fit.

Did any of that make sense at all? he said doubtfully...

Mark Rand RTF

On Mon, 25 Sep 2006 21:09:11 -0700, with neither quill nor qualm, Grant Erwin quickly quoth:

(I haven't even set up my bender yet,) But, in my vast experience, I'd do the short bend first. Juscuz. How many are you doing?

Won't it all depend upon your bender or press setup, Grant? Try it and see which way works best for you. Practice on cheaper stock first to determine bend radius losses. DAMHIKT.

On Tue, 26 Sep 2006 12:20:27 +0100, with neither quill nor qualm, Mark Rand quickly quoth:

Is your "last one" the one closest to the middle of the stick or toward the end of the stick? Or was that a rhetorical treatise?

You got it in one, Mark. (The doubtfully part. ;)

Well, I made the handles, and learned really a lot. Here's a pic:

Main lesson is to get some cheap stock to practice on. I got some 3/8" four footers of rebar to practice with, cheap at a buck and a quarter. By the time I was done bending up two of those, I knew how to make these parts.

GWE

Grant Erw> I have a guy who wants me to bend him some long pull hooks with

So, which way did you sequence the bends?

I'd bet from outwards to inwards.

Nick

If you consider the junction of the shaft and the handle to be point A, then the other 2 vertices of the handle are B and C, where C connects the segment that has a free end. I bent A first, then B, then C. I tried bending B first and partly bending C, then A, then finishing C. Bending the vertex with the free end first didn't make sense to me. The bent parts interfere with the stop block and dies of the bender.

Grant

The last one was the one at the end of the stick as per the original post :-)

Mark Rand RTFM