We have a handy little metal bender in the shop, but it really only works well for flat bar and strap. We need to bend some tubing for an upcoming project, so we decided to make our own tubing bender dies, using the CNC plasma cutter. Is it very practical? No. Is it easy to set up? Not really. Is it easy to use? Not by a long shot. But does it work? Yes it does!

Okay, I know it’s silly to assume that having a CNC plasma cutter is an easy, cheap alternative to buying a set of dies. And we agree, this is kind of a useless project unless you have access to the proper tools. However, we were just curious if stacked layers would actually produce a useable result, and it totally did! In fact, this could be used as proof-of-concept for building an entire bending machine using nothing but the plasma table. That might be worth exploring in the future.

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