crushed tubing ends

[thevillageinn]

Inspired by a recent post where we saw some nice tooling and a press crushing and possibly even punching a hole in tubing ends I realized that would be the easiest way to fabricate some leg braces for a rolling cooler at work.

I grabbed some 1/4 x 1" steel strap scraps and made them fit over the jaws of my vise. I ground a small concave section to create the radius at the transition from round tube to flat end. I quickly annealed the tube to make the crush more successful and flattened it with the vise finishing with a hammer.




I ground a radius and deburred the flat ends, added some holes and now I have a few cross braces ready for installation.



The "dies" could use a little fine tuning but for what this is and my first go at this - worked great.
My thanks to everyone who contributes here - there's a wealth of knowledge and you never know what will spark an idea for something down the road.