Cheap Ast sheet metal bender

[astroracer]

I built a simple sheet metal bender out of scraps I had laying around. Necessity being the mother that it is, I had to bend a panel for the van that was just under 39 inches long and the 3-in-1 is too short to do that.
This is the panel. You can see the dashed tangent line at the top. That's where I needed a 1" radius bend.


Using some 3 x 3/8ths plate, a piece of 1x2 tubing and the top tube out of an old swingset I fabbed up a simple bender that will clamp the steel in place and except a piece 48" wide.
Here you can see the 38" wide piece we bent for the trial. It has a short flange on one side and we just clamped it in place and hand bent it (20ga).

You can see the tube here with the bent flange at the top.

Here is the panel set in place. Very nice.

See next post for continuation...
Mark