Best tool for bending round

You should take a look at the Universal Multipurpose Metalbender at

bends bar, rod, and tube. I've had one for a number of years and found it extremely useful and versatile.

//tinyurl.com/3unb9p

This is the HF bench bender;

It looks nice, but the shipping to the US doubles the price. Ouch!

Doug White

--These guys have a fair selection of benders and theyre very reasonable if you need extra die sets, etc.

Just wanted to revisit this topic... Thanks for all the ideas. In the end I built a jig that works quite well. Photo:

When you clamp a small stop to butt the back end of the round up to, and another stop at the front for the handle to stop down on, you can create the exact same angle bend, in the same place each time... up to about 90 degrees. It works good for the 1/4" aluminum, but probably not for anything harder.

Beautiful little jig. I expect after quite a few bends you'll need to replace that plastic bushing/roller but that should be no problem. Depending on the needed precision you may start to detect slight variations before it actually fails.

needed precision

Yeah, I actually already changed the ones on the handle to wider 3/4". Using a locking nut helps keep it at the right tension without being too much. Luckily I have a ton of different nylon spacers left over from other stuff. Nylon always amazes me. I have some nylon bushings on the shafts of a parts tumbler I built that has been run for about

200 hours and they haven't worn through at all.