I just remembered that the pipe I make peripheral ports from is 6061 and it comes in mandrel bends. The bends cost out the wazoo. $21 for a really short 90. The whole piece is maybe 4".
I will post a pic of what those look like later.

ARGH!!!! Read this
http://www.burnsstainless.com/Alumin...minumtube.html

what newbernD said 110% agrees with my welding/metalurgy books. so you will either have to get some 6061 that has been annealed, do it yourself or skip the Al for something else

What is ironic as hell is that in an earlier post someone suggested heating the tube to bend it. It turns out I have to heat the tube but prior to the bending. The 6061 I use if T6.
Mudda Fugger! Oh well I guess I need to just laugh this off. It sure explains a lot. But I have come to expect things like this when I blindly dive head first into project :(

NewbernD if you are ever in the Dallas/Fort Worth area I owe you beer my man! Hell whoever suggested the "dildo" process (I think it was Kenku) I owe you as well. Thanks guys.
The great thing about when I have one of my ideas you guys always come to the rescue when the wheels fall off :eek:

I had forgot all about annealing because I never really had to deal with it. When you run into some soft aluminum it can make you miserable as hell to cut it and grinding gums the hell out of tooling.
Up until now all the aluminum I wanted to deal with has always been hard enough to saw. It never dawned on me that would make it impossible to bend.
Hell, I guess it was just too obvious for me to comprehend ;)

I am finding all kinds of articles now that talk about prepping aluminum for bending :confused:

http://www.eskimo.com/~smallnet/JoeA...lLandGear.html

This is a really good write up. Read the "torch soot" method. Any of you the have ever been in a shop when some nitwit fired up a torch without any oxygen will get a flashback from this article. :eek: Nothing bugs me more than soot floating in the air from a torch :mad:

Funny.. I found that same article earlier when I did a quick google search.

I heated a piece of aluminum up today (hot enough for gravity to bend it), and quenched it.. It was significantly easier to work than in its previous state.

Mmm, beer. Likewise if you make it to DC/Baltimore.

It has been a few years but I have been to Andrews AFB there. My company does the maintenance on Airforce One and Two. If their computers need upgrading or something it could bring me there and to Reston.
I never have enough time to hit any of the Smithsonian museums or anything but I can find time for beer and 7's :D

Hey Hans these people even have info and training on English Wheels! http://www.tinmantech.com/html/power..._machines.html
I spent a while surfing that site. It has a lot of good info.

so do you heat and cool slowly to harden Al.

i never messed with the stuff, i like mah steels, none of that fancy metal
besides i would rather have inconel or some moly than some tinfoil:p:

great site scalliwag, maybe everyone should start documenting some of their budget(DIY) crap and make a section for it :D

Why you gotta do me like that Hans??!?!?!?!?! ;) j/k Man I am happy just learning how to temporarily make it bendable. I can hardly wait to get home and try it :D

If you heat it, and cool it slowly, it goes softer.

If you heat it, then chuck it in a bucket of water - it's hardened

Well things started off a little bad and when to worse :mad: Since I did not have a temp stick the easiest way was to "soot" the tube and burn it off like a couple of the links talked about. I accidently blew through the pipe while I was burning off the soot.
When I put the pipe in the bender I had forgot I had pulled off the clamp holding it to the stand.
What happened next sucked real bad and only confirms that Mondays fugg'n suck ass. That big bastard fell off the stand and I could only get it by one hand.
It didn't hurt the bender at all but I have a pretty well pulled or torn shoulder and bicep. It hurts to even type.
I am trying to remember if you use ice and then heat or the opposite when you pull something?
Obviously I couldn't even get the damn thing back on the stand :(
So I am down a couple of days and this sucks. Anybody close to Fort Worth? ;)

jesus:eek: glad your ok(is intact better)
back when i worked at a local pizza place a dough roller fell off its stand and some newb tried to grab it, shattered like 23 bones in his hand and ripped a finger off. Took 4 guys to pick it up and we didnt get it far off the ground...heavy sumabitch

later that same kid somehow bypassed the saftey crap(i dunn how) and 'rolled' his fingers....

For 6061:

O Temper (Annealing)-Heat to 775° F, hold temperature for two to three hours, cool at a rate of 50°
F per hour down to 500°F, then air cool.

T4 Temper (Solution Heat Treating)-Heat to 985° F, hold temperature long enough for thorough
heating, then quench in water.

T451 Temper-Stress relieve (by stretching) to produce a specified amount of permanent set subsequent
to solution heat treat-ing and prior to precipitation heat treating.

T6 Temper (Precipitation Heat Treating)-Heat to 320° F, hold temperature for 18 hours, and then air
cool. You can also heatto 350° F, hold temperature for 8 hours, and then air cool.

T651 Temper-Stress relieve (by stretching) to produce a specified amount of permanent set subsequent
to solution heat treat-ing and prior to precipitation heat treating.

In the annealed condition, this alloy can be readily cold worked by conventional methods such
as bending, forming, deep draw-ing, spinning, and stamping. Hot working temperature range is
500° to 700° F








i could have sworn Al was annealed by queching
EDIT: jsut got off the phone with my buddy(machinist) for all practical purposes, Al CAN and IS annealed by quenching, the faster colder the quench the softer it gets. Also it will return to the original hardness over time or it can be hurried along by heating and air cooling. If you want it to harden even more you can heat it and bury it to SLOWLY cool down.
funky metal...

Grabbing it was more of a defense mechanism because it came over towards me. The thought of that big mammer-jammer landing on my foot or hitting the floor in a way that threw part of it against my leg was kind of a natural concern (well in-grained from accidents past :eek: )
Surprisingly (almost shockingly) my shoulder is not very sore and my bicep has just a little soreness only when I tighten it. That is a relief :D Usually if something hurts that bad afterwards it makes for a really rough week or so.
I watched the football game with a heating pad on it and to a little beyond the recommended dose of Tylenol so it may have made alot of difference. It seemed more serious a pull at the time.

So if I am feeling chipper tonight I will wrestle that big bitch off the floor and back on the stand and try to make a bend. I dragged the tube into the house much to Ms. Scalli's shagrin and tried squeezing around on it and it did not seem any softer :confused: So I am thinking I need a temp stick and a way to consistantly anneal this shit.
I sent an email to that "Tinman" guy for suggestions.
Ms. Scalli told me I was an idiot because my arm was jacked up and I was bringing a pipe in the house. But it was new clean aluminum (there was no soot left on it ;) )

May be (this sounds familiar), but it fulfills the primal need to tinker/engineer and it's probably cheaper than a divorce..

;)

Scalli, you may want to consider sand packing your bends first

I might just end up doing that. Of course the dildo has to get pulled out for that. :eek:

I did a project 2 years ago that required a 2" tube 21' long to be coiled 18" in diameter at a coil spacing as close as possible. We found EXACTLY one tube bender in the country who would even attempt it.


Tube bending is an ART, and the few shops that are good at it are in high demand.

What was that tube for and were they able to do it?

It was for a gas isotope seperation project, The tube themselves had a "copper sponge disc" inserted into it to increase the heat transfer rate through the storage media. Yes they did it, took 15 tubes to end up with 3 acceptable ones that were used. I think we ended up trashing ~ $120,000 worth of the copper sponge material. (Very neat shit BTW)

So did the separation project work also? That sure sounds interesting. We had the Superconducting Supercollider project going until they pulled the plug on that. I was really looking forward to seeing if that worked too :(

our projects are very similiar in what the final product was/is. Mine is nearing operation. Same gas, Same isotope.
"We don't make the bomb, we make the bomb bigger!"