Tribute of a Hossfeld No 2 bender build, let's discuss.

[Frank S]

A guy came to my shop once with a Hydraulically powered factory Hossfeld a set of very tight radius 1" square tubing dies and a contract to manufacture stocking carts the first part of the contract was for 300 carts. Each cart had 15 pieces of tubing and 8 bends. cutting the tubing was no problem as my wife could place an entire 80 stick bundle in our band saw the bottle neck was in the bender not being designed for heavy continuous production work the little 120 volt 1 HP power unit only produced about 1 GPM and the die he had special ordered could only bend 1 piece at a time the 2 1/2 inch cylinder seemed to have enough power so I made a set of double grove dies this did not quite double the production speed maybe 80%. So I got the bright Idea of replacing the power unit with a 220v 2 1/2 HP unit This yielded close to 180% increased productivity. Now my wife could set up the saw for a cut and bend up enough tubes to keep 5 welders busy and build up enough extra inventory for another day's worth of production. But even at that rate of production we were not going to be able to meet the shipment date So I put on a 2nd shift making the shop a 24 hr operation yes we worked 12 + hour shifts
She and I arrived one morning only to find the bender mangled. One of the guys had thought it would be cute to bend a piece of solid sq bar stock They had no reason to even need the bender or the saw on the night shift. But now I had 5 welders and 8 helpers who were going to run out of work by noon I put 3 of my better guys busy making new parts for the bender out of T1 (ASTM 514) steel while I repaired the dies Making the bender nearly indestructible. We also added bronze bearings to the main pivot points and didn't waste time drilling all of the extra adjustment holes that we didn't use