Hydraulic Bender for Solid and/or Tube

Hi All:

Just wondering if anyone can recommend a hydraulic bender that will bend solid as well as tube that is affordable for a small shop? I need to bend up to 1.25" flat and 1" round solid and up to 2.25" round cold roll steel.

Thanks,

Jim

Reply to
Papasmithy
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A hossfeld bender will do all of that manually. If you mean 1 1/4" wide flat bar, thats a snap- a hossfeld will handle up to 4" wide flat the easy way, up to 3" the hard way, if you heat it. But 2" x 1/4" flat bar the hard way,cold,is quite do-able.

I bend 1" round all the time on my hossfeld. And 2" schedule 40 pipe, which is actually 2 3/8" OD.

A base hossfeld is $800. The tooling packages I would recommend for most utility push it upto almost 2 grand,but with those dies, you can bend an amazing variety of things.

"Cheap" hydraulic benders with less capacity start around 5 grand, and go up from there, unless you are talking about a chinese jack from Harbor Freight.

Hossfeld-not to be confused with cheezy copies, american or chinese.

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A decent hydraulic bender I would consider for general shop use would be one of these from EAGLE-
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find the E-Matic bender.

I have had my hossfeld for almost 30 years, in a working shop, bending thousands of bends manually. It works great, is very flexible and useful, and is a bargain for what it will do and how long it will last.

Reply to
Ries

Well, the little Harbor Freight pipe bender can be persuaded to do some cool things, and it comes with six dies, but they are sized for pipe OD, not bar stock or tube. It's certainly affordable.

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Note, their $125 list price on this is a little slushy. This, like most HF items, regularly goes on sale. I bought this exact item used on Craigslist locally for $25 missing only one die, which I obtained from HF parts for about $8 including shipping.

There is a lot you can't do with one of these, but a lot you can.

GWE

Reply to
Grant Erwin

To follow up on my own note, if you go visit harborfreightusa.com and look at their current ad flyer on page 9 you will see the h/v pipe bender on sale for $90 which is a lot better than $125 list. You have to print out that coupon and take it to one of their stores.

GWE

Reply to
Grant Erwin

If you just have the occasional piece, you may want to find a local muffler shop already so equipped.

Reply to
Richard J Kinch

JD Squared makes a very popular Hossfeld clone

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The model 3 starts at $300. The dies will cost between $50 and $100 per set. You can get the base machine and a few dies sets for basic bending, then later fill out your die collection, and add hydraulics.

Reply to
Ernie Leimkuhler

The JD 2 bender is a great machine- BUT, its been redesigned to bend tube and pipe, and only tube and pipe. And then, only in precise radius bends, a new dieset for each size of tube and each radius bend. It bends tube and pipe BETTER than the original hossfeld- but it is useless for the other 999 things a hossfeld will do.

So if you are doing roll cages, or motorcycle frames, a JD 2 is a really great tool, and quite reasonably priced, too.

But if you need to bend 3" flat bar the hard way, or angle iron flange in, or square tube in a 12 foot radius, or 3/8" square on the diagonal, a hossfeld will do it and a JD 2 bender will not.

Reply to
Ries

Ries,

Thanks for the note, I will try to take a look at them this week. I noticed that the #2 has a Hydraulic attachment to it. Any comments regarding that? I've thought about Hossfeld for a while.....

Jim

Ries wrote:

Reply to
Papasmithy

Hydraulics on a hossfeld are handy if you are doing either lots of very heavy stuff- like 3" pipe- or you are doing hundreds of the same bend. For day to day stuff, I think they would get in the way. And they cost an extra 2 grand.

I am no Arnold, certainly more in the 98lb weakliing category, and I find the hossfeld has plenty of leverage for most jobs- for little stuff, 3/8" or so, I dont even bother to put the 4 foot handle on. For bigger stuff, you can add the second handle, and have 8 feet of leverage. This is enough to pull pretty thick stuff.

For production, I suppose hydrualics would be good, but a lot of what I do requires the tactile feedback that the hossfeld design offers- for instance, I might forge texture a piece of 1 1/2" schedule 40 pipe- and then use the hossfeld to straighten it out again, after I have heat and beat it into submission- I did a bunch of these lately,

14' long pieces, and though it took a while, I just used the 4 foot handle, and was able to get plenty of leverage.

I often bend complicated shapes freehand, or put slight arcs into pieces, or straighten out flat bar after punching lots of holes in it with the ironworker- all processes where a light touch is much better than brute force.

If your application is 500 pieces a day of 1" bar, all bent to the exact same radius, then, yeah, hydraulics would be good.

Just depends on what kind of work you do. The hydraulics do disengage pretty easily.

Reply to
Ries

I picked up the Harbor Freight compact bench bender the other day on sale for $48 (ITC price, lowest I've seen). The instructions with it are of course rather limited so I'm wondering if there are some sites around with better instructions.

Thanks,

Pete C.

Reply to
Pete C.

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