The Bender Box

[dankycrawler]

Recently I had one of those "wouldnt it be cool if?" ideas and decided to try and bring it to reality.

Basically I have been learning CNC with a Router and been making some pretty cool stuff.. A while back I thought to add a 4th axis to my cnc router and install a rotary controller / table. I had some parts gathered for it but never actually picked up the rotary table. Fast forward a few months and as I was looking at the parts thought...

Wouldnt it be cool to build a tube bender using this stuff ... And so thats what i set out to do..

Meet .... The Bender Box



A stand alone Desktop RC sized Pipe bender



Built the enclosure from Hdpe on my cnc router, pretty proud of the way it came out.. I can post somepics of the build process later.

It allows you to define a specific angle you want to bend material to and repeat that bend on multiple parts. As of now I have made dies for 1/8 and 3/16, its strong enough to bend 3/16 brake line as well as solid rod.










I might be making some adjustments as I go to the bending mechanisim but so far i am stoked.

[Big Daddy]

We want video..

[Calderwood]

Awesome job! These cnc wire benders that keep popping up are really cool but I will really be interested when they can rotate the tube to bend on a different axis like the 1:1 cnc tube benders. Is that something that you feel like you can accomplish?

[stelerzman]

Ya, where's the video and where are the stops???

[evilozz]

drool......... i want one : )

[boosted4lyf]

Holy shat!

[bob1961]

shit look at my builds I have done with just a hand bender I made and hand tools ....

[T_A]

very cool! can you post some pics of the internals ?

[dankycrawler]

Thanks for the comments guys ..

Here are a couple other pics, Ill get a video of it in action soon too.

You can see the stepper, gearbox, and driver, the controller is mounted on the top under the screen and a power supply in the back.





Being cut out on the router

[danmac]

That is cool as Hell what did it cost to make

[Calderwood]

Originally Posted by Calderwood

Awesome job! These cnc wire benders that keep popping up are really cool but I will really be interested when they can rotate the tube to bend on a different axis like the 1:1 cnc tube benders. Is that something that you feel like you can accomplish?

When you get a chance I would appreciate if you would answer this question.

[mjderstine]

love this. can you sell them for under $100

really nice work dude.

[dankycrawler]

Originally Posted by Calderwood

When you get a chance I would appreciate if you would answer this question.

Must have missed your question, You could easily build something very similar with multiple axis control to either move or rotate the tube to allow for full cnc control, I would assume that it would be more complicated as you would either need to adapt software already written for a cnc pipe bender or write your own. But I see the mechanical part of it being possible. Maybe using something like a Gecko 3 axis driver hooked to a pc with the above mentioned software.

This example I put together uses a stand alone controller, that only supports 1 axis, you have to measure and mark where you want the bends to be on a tube, then line it up with a mark on the machine and only controls the degree of the bend, you can rotate the tube by hand, ill have to see how accurate I can get with measuring the angle that I turn it between two bends.

hope that answers your question.


About the cost... Ill have to look back at what I spent on these parts, Like I mentioned before I picked them up a while back intending to use them for a rotary table on my cnc. don't think the parts were less than 100 bucks combined, I did buy some higher end components though. but I am sure you could use cheaper stepper motor and drivers, you may not need a gearbox either.. not sure but this setup has more than enough torque to bend anything I would be using on a RC.

[BuhBoombuh]

Wow that is awesome dankycrawler!

My business partner and I are very interested in this and would you be willing to re create another one to sell?
Looking forward to your reply you can PM me if needed, we need something like this!

[rockhugger]

I like that this is stand alone... I can handle re-positioning my tubing manually. It's just nice to know the deg. will be consistent and accurate.
I'd enjoy building this for sure.
Can you provide more detail on the controls and various parts used?

[MountainStorm]

That is way cool. The basic concept is brilliant and the execution is dead sexy.

[JokersWild]

Build a dual die and see if ya can get it to bend 2 pieces of 3/16 6061....... That would be nice

[juan r]

Any more updates on this?

[CM9000]

Need one!

Sent from my LGMP260 using Tapatalk

[JatoTheRipper]

This is awesome! Any video yet?