THSCC Forums

If you go to the muffler shops like Meineke that bend teir own pipe they often have a bin of misbent or miscut pieces. They may sell them at a reasonable price and you can cut them up like mandrel bends.
The reason the HF bender won't work, is because it is a PIPE bender not a TUBING bender. There is a big difference in the way pipe and tubing are measured. Pipe is speced by it's nominal inside diameter, i.e. a 1/2" pipe is always 1/2" inside irrespective of the wall thickness. Tubing is speced by it's OUTSIDE dimension and wall thickness, i.e. a 1/2" tube is always 1/2" on the outside. The mandrel for bending a piece of 1/2" pipe will be much too large to bend 1/2" tubing without crushing it. There are somewhat "inexpensive" mandrel tubing benders depending on size that work off a hydraulic hand pump like a porta power. You neeed to look at suppliers that supply race shops for them Exhaust pipe is especially problematic to bend due to it's large diameter with a very thin wall. That's why you see the characteristic squeezed bends in inexpensive replacement exhaust pipes. IMHO you'll be sorely dissapointed in that HF bender.

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SPIN or WIN!
there's no glory for going slow.

Well I bought the HF bender for $69 on sale minus a 15% coupon. Lots of metal for the price! Dustin and Gary were over tonight and we did some "testing" on a very thin-walled 2.25" pipe I had. The pipe fit great in the 2" die.

Looks like 5-10 degree bends are no problem at all, look great. Not mandrel great but very similar to the "real" bends that a shop bender would make. Much more angle than that, not so good. It bends the pipe fine but buckles on the inside and flattens it out. We did up to probably a 20 degree bend and it would _work_ fine ("for someone else's car") but I wouldn't want it on a performance application.

I wouldn't hesitate to do 5-10 degree bends and in fact we think that if more angle was needed, multiple bends could be made in different areas of the pipe. For anything more than 10 degrees in a performance application I'll be using mandrel bends. This will be great for that "I need a little tweak" bends -- plus it will be neat to be able to put a bend in just about anything -- things like conduit tire racks, camera mounts, yard art, who knows what else.

First exhaust project -- 2.25" cherry-bomb midpipe for the Subaru. Next project -- unequal length 2" single-port headers

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Mike Whitney
whit32@gmail.com, 919-454-5445
V10, V8, V8t, I6, I6, V6, F4t, I4, I4, I4, I4, I2, 1, 1