Tubing Bender Technique

[Frank S]

I used to have to use this method when bending 1" sch 40 pipe for hand rails on caterpillar equipment What I would do was weld a cap on one end then fill and pack blast media inside then weld a cap on the other end. The problem then was the hand rails had to be formed to an odd radius size to match those of the factory bends finding something with the correct curve to bend the pipe around was sometimes challenging without a lathe. Then the only way to bend the pipe was to heat it, if you took yo9ur time you could very nearly perfectly match a factory mandrel bent railing.