Advice on miter and tube bender
 

I want to tinker with building some bike racks to develop some skills. I will be bending and cutting up to 5/8 material. I have a drill press. Can anyone suggest a cheap but effective miter and tube bender. Thanks

5/8" seems a bit too beefy for racks. Are you sure you didn't mean 5/16"? For 5/16" any cheap tubing bender will work. For 5/8" I suggest looking for a used Ridgid 358 ratchet bender.

Avoid those $130 bench mounted pipe benders that come with a bunch of dies. They are a waste of money and require modification to prevent denting the tube. The price is attractive to a new builder, but they don't produce acceptable results. I would guess that most of them end up like mine, sitting under a bench and taking up space.

Great advice. Thank you. 5/8 is the largest material I plan to work with. Other purposes. Now I need to figure out a jig or miter to to use with my drill press to cut the tubing correctly.

Get a vise for the drill press. Buy or make some tube blocks to fit the tube sizes you will use and use hole saws to cut the miters. A digital angle gauge will help with setting the angle for anything other than 90 degree cuts.

I suggest mitering with files unless you are building a car frame out of 5/8" tubing and there are a huge number of miters. Mitering is pretty difficult on a drill press, you'll likely get fairly good at putting your chuck back on.

Most home drill presses are not very rigid and drill press vises with angled tube blocks and hole saws even less so. If you must go this path leave a few MMs to finish file to, angles and centerlines can drift quite easily.

Another option for hole saw mitering are the "Joint Jigger" family of hand drill powered, bench vise mounted adjustable angle devices. These too are generally found to be rather flexible and results drift from intended settings. Many here use a paper template generated from a miter app and cut/grind/file to the line. In the end it is the actual tube to tube fit up that counts and this is best fine tuned with a hand file. Andy

I would do hand-mitring with paper templates for 5/8 and just do it by hand/eye altogether for 5/16.

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