Improving a Harbor freight pipe bender

[JeffEck]

We took the HF bender, kinda copied, added a hydraulic cylinder, and bend connecting to the pump on our 100yr old homemade 250ton press. We built ours to bend horizontally so that we can support with saw horses when doing complex pipes with mult bends. We make our own dies as the HF ones nearly always kink when you go 90 degrees no matter how slow you go even on schedule 40 and 80. This also allows us to make whatever radius above minimum that we desire. The sides of our dies go past the center of the sides of the pipe and we roll a flat strap for the pipe to form against. We tried something similar to what you are doing, but went too thin with our half sleeves. I am going to turn some sleeves similar yours, when I have time, to improve our bends. However, I am going to pin the sleeves in the center so that I can just delete the rollers completely if that makes sense. I like your idea, thank you for sharing!