The words bender owners never want to hear were muttered in the shop recently, "I bent the bender". Normally this involves a bent pin or two. Worse case is bending/twisting one of the main arms or breaking a die. In this case we bent the pins, arms, ram mount and the intermediate mount between the bender and the cart. Note to self: If I want to bend that thick of material, I should buy a bender rated for it...
Tubing bender in question is a JD2 model 3 powered by a custom hydraulic setup. Nothing fancy, same thing that is in most shops and personal garages. We originally put it together over 8 years ago and have abused it almost daily since. Can't remember how many times it's limits were pushed by exceeding it's stated capacity. Speaks to the quality of JD2's design. But nothing lasts forever. So besides for a few family obligations I have spent the majority of my time in the shop fixing the tubing bender this holiday weekend. Hasn't been the most pleasant of times discovering just how abused it was and how much work there is to fix things but I think it is coming out well and in the end with be a much stronger product as long as we treat it with respect...
It is never fun having to go from a fully functioning piece of money making equipment:
To this:
Upon disassembly the arms look to be in decent shape for their age and use. Though the holes do show a lot of wear and some are even galled pretty well.
But they did bend some. Almost an 1/8" from end to end. Here is a new arm on top of an old one. The pins all line up in both arms but the bolt holes won't. Check out why:
The intermediate mount also got tweaked pretty good. Both the top and bottom plates were bent.
And the ram mount, a piece of 2"x 3" x 3/16" wall tubing twisted. Over an 1/8" of twist in a 3.5" span!