Shopsmith Forums

My 5’ connector tubes have some slight bends in places. I’d like to remove them.

Would I have any success building a straightening tool out of appropriately sized pulleys? Or is there a better way? Or am I dreaming?

Jim

jmoore65 wrote:My 5’ connector tubes have some slight bends in places. I’d like to remove them.

Would I have any success building a straightening tool out of appropriately sized pulleys? Or is there a better way? Or am I dreaming?

Jim

I do not know what that is.

It might be a fruitless undertaking.

It has been my experience that when trying to make metal rods, tubing or wire curved, rollers do work well. Went trying to make something straight again with rollers it is very difficult. Not impossible, but if you don't have a continuous consistent bend to work with you'll be struggling to straighten it again. You fix one bent area, then inadvertently bend one previously straight area, and the iterative process continues until you get frustrated and toss it aside for another day.

JPG wrote:

jmoore65 wrote:My 5’ connector tubes have some slight bends in places. I’d like to remove them.

Would I have any success building a straightening tool out of appropriately sized pulleys? Or is there a better way? Or am I dreaming?

Jim

I do not know what that is.

It might be a fruitless undertaking.

something like this : https://www.amazon.com/Tool-Guy-Republi ... B073W197H5

Jim

I would agree with Steel510, I don't see how you could straighten connector rods to an acceptable level once there is a bend in it. The connector rods are a type of rigid pipe, similar to electrical EMT. I have done my fair share of EMT bending for electrical work and once you have a bend it is darn near impossible to bring it back to a completely straight pipe again using a bending tool. The pulley type tool shown is for straightening tubing, not for rigid pipe. You would need a ductile or malleable material to go through a pulley mechanism like this, otherwise it would take something like a hydraulic press to push the connector rods through the pulley mechanism. In the end, I still don't think it would straighten with this because the material is too rigid. Like in EMT bending you would need to pull the rod in the opposite direction to counteract a bend, so just putting it through pulleys won't straighten a bend in rigid material (IMHO).

It would likely be cheaper to buy new 5" tubes over buying the items needed to try to straighten your bent tubes. The tubes are part number 521942 5-Ft Connector Tubes (pair) for $58.25. Here is the catalog link.

https://www.shopsmith.com/ownersite/cat ... ntubes.htm

You could cut the bent areas out and have additional shorter connector tubes if cutting out the bends leave enough useful tube lengths.

Those 'pulleys' look like 'rollers' to me!

I agree re comment re malleable.

A conduit bender only bends in one direction. Repositioning(180°) the bender is required to 'reduce' a bend.

Thanks for the responses.