I needed to bend a tube, and I didn’t want to buy a tube bender. I had scrap plywood, left over hardware from other projects, and just wanted to see if it would work.
Brilliant work, dude! Well done!!! 😃 A few years back I drew a few bicycles... I ended up paying someone to build one of them, but I always wanted to do it myself some day. So... Who knows, maybe I end up making one of those! 😂 Anyway, stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
Great project and video! It looks like it worked perfectly, but one way you could get a tighter tolerance on the groove in the wheel might be to get the basic shape with your gouges - then wrap a piece of sandpaper around the tube you intend to bend and use that as your tool. The groove would perfectly match the radius of your pipe (plus the thickness of the sandpaper).
I think if I replaced the arm with steel, the plywood rollers would still work well enough for aluminum and at bigger pipe diameters, at least for a large enough radius. But until I need that, this shop built tool is good enough.
