Built a Cheap Ast radius bender

[astroracer]

Today Mel and I made a simple sheet metal bender out of scraps I had laying around. Necessity being the mother that it is, I had to bend a panel for the van that was just under 39 inches long and the 3-in-1 is too short to do that.
This is the panel. You can see the dashed tangent line at the top. That's where we needed a 1" radius bend.


Using some 3 x 3/8ths plate, a piece of 1x2 tubing and the top tube out of an old swingset I fabbed up a simple bender that will clamp the steel in place and except a piece 48" wide.
Here you can see the 38" piece we bent for the trial. It has a short flange on one side and we just clamped it in place and hand bent it (20ga).

You can see the tube here with the bent flange at the top.

Here is the panel set in place. Very nice.

I will get some clearer pics later. Once the sheet was bent I cleaned up the bender and sprayed it gloss orange so I had to wait to let the paint dry.
This is the "top" piece. There are no bolts. It just gets C-Clamped together while I am doing the bend. Quick and easy...

The bottom half. This is a 1 x 2 rect tube welded to the two end plates. The upper half clamps in between to capture the sheet being bent. This guy will clamp to the fab bench or the jig tables.

Mel and I spent about an hour making this thing. Do you know how much time it will save trying to clamp steel and round tubing together to make a long bend? A LOT!!!
Mark