1" wide 1/4" thick Al flat stock rolling bender project?

I think I would make the machine pretty much as it is shown, and add supports to keep the aluminum vertical to the rollers. Ideally the supports would be more rollers, but I suspect you could get by with guides that don't rotate. Might want to line them with some plastic to prevent scoring the aluminum.

Dan

The best is when the rollers conform to the shape of the material that is being bent. Getting that stock down to a 18" ID diameter will not be easy tho as the aluminum may start tearing.

-- Why isn't there an Ozone Hole at the NORTH Pole?

I'd consider the first one as Experimental...

If it starts cracking, the only recourse would be to anneal the aluminum bar stock with a torch or an oven after each pass or two through the rollers.

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Another way to consider doing this would be to fabricate a rolling mill with tapered gap between the rolls. As you roll the ring the way you are talking, the outer edge is going to get thinner anyway, this would just take advantage, but might help keep the tearing down by forcing the thinning to be equal throughout. jk

Very interesting idea! I think I can fabricate such a device...

Take Care, James Lerch

(My telescope construction, Testing, and Coating site)

Press on: nothing in the world can take the place of perseverance. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. Calvin Coolidge

I have done this a lot- but I have used storebought tools that I actually paid cash money for. I use two different tools to do this type of thing- A hossfeld bender- hossfeld makes flat bar edge bending dies for their angle iron flange in die setup, and it works quite well for exactly this sort of job. It actually uses a wedge configuration that tightens down on the metal the harder you pull, so you can bend flat bar the hard way in radiuses from about 6" to 36" or larger. Of course, a hossfeld tooled up this way will run about $1500, and in this age of harbor freight, few people want to spend that. But a hossfeld will do this quite easily, repeatably, and to fixed radiuses. Along with doing about 5 million other things.

The other tool I use to do this is my CP-40 Curvatricci from Eagle-

powered section roll designed to do just this sort of thing. They use a series of multipart dies that bolt onto a shaft, rather than one piece tooling with a slot milled in it. That way, you can stack spacers up to fit any size of flat bar. I have spacers ranging from 16ga up to about 3/4" thick, in many different sizes, so I can always get a nice snug fit on most any thickness bar. I like to have the flat bar just slide thru the die- a few thousandths clearance. But if it sticks, I can always add a spacer. The outer dies, shaped like big donuts, are about 6" in diameter and 1" thick, while the spacers are about 2 1/2" od. This means a 1" flat bar is completely supported in all three dies. The radius you can bend would depend on the up and down travel of your central roller, and the center spacing of your two lower rolls. A machine designed to get very tight radius on small bar might be less useful when you are rolling 2" pipe, so design parameter vary depending on machine size- if you look on their website, you will see the spacing, and hence the tightness of radius possible, is much closer on the little tiny machines than it is on the ones made to roll

6" pipe. It takes a fair amount of power to roll large flat bar this way- I do a lot of stainless, in 3/8" and 1/2" thicknesses. But you could probably do this small aluminum with a hand crank machine. Multiple passes will probably be required, to sneak up on your radius, as trying to bend the aluminum all in one pass would undoubtedly crack it. This would make it a little tougher to get matching circles, but certainly not impossible- you just check em against a template, and roll again, until you get there. My curvatricci has a digital readout, so theoretically you can return to the same setting with every new piece of material, and this works pretty well, although even within the same mill run, there are variations in how a piece of metal will bend.

Now with a hossfeld, you just put on the 9" radius die, and you pull an 18" circle every time.

Reis,

On your dies with wedge, are all three rollers identical, or do only the outside radius rollers have the wedge?

Any chance you could post / email some pictures of the various dies?

Take Care, James Lerch

(My telescope construction, Testing, and Coating site)

Press on: nothing in the world can take the place of perseverance. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. Calvin Coolidge