whats the best way to bend a pipe like this?

[gs4492]

Hi. I need to bend a 10mm OD aluminium pipe like the attached image. It dosent have to be aluminium but this was all i could find in 10mm
without having to buy a large coil of pipe. Can someone offer some advice regarding the best way to do this?

Of course i could fill it with sand and bend it around something but i would like the bend to be fairly precise. Although i imagine it might be difficult to bend the 90 degree angle accurately by hand.

Are there any kind of bending tools which can do both arcs (4" radius approx) and 90 degree angles like this? I have seen pipe benders but itlooks as though i would have to continuously move the pipe bender in order to get the arc.

You help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

10mm pipe.jpg

[RWOLFEJR]

Hi,
Can't bend a hard 90 degree like what you show there. Best you can do to get that (without tooling up for serious action) would be to miter cut and weld for that hard corner. I have a brake / fuel line bending tool that works nice on the small diameter stuff that was inexpensive. Type brake line bending tool on google or wherever... or at a place like Summit Racing. The tool I have has about three or four slots for different common size tubes. A 3/8" bender (probably more commonly found) should work O.K.. My recollection is the radius this tool produces is about 1 to 1-1/2"??

[CCR5600Design]

Here's what I did for a job similar to this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqZoEd8iNjk

By playing with different sized rollers, you can come up with various bend radii. It is simple, cheap and effective.

Good luck!



Ron

[gs4492]

thanks for the replies. yeh i decided to bite the bullet and go out and buy one of the those pipe benders. I managed to grab one for just over 10 quid. The 90 was easy to do but i had to make do with 3 x 30 degree bends in order to get the 90 degree arc. i would have preferred a smooth arc but it does the job.

@CCR5600Design - That looks good. i have no engineering experience but i may look into trying something like that next time.

cheers.