Cam, that is an excellent idea. I never would have though to use the capillary action of soldering to fill the void. That will also ward off potential of corrosion and should withstand the heat from powder coating. Great idea.
I agree that after powder coating I would still apply a generous bead of seam sealer to the underside just to deter the build up of moisture and road spray/debris on the underside of the tube and sheet metal joint.
I will definitely have to file that away in my head for future.
Thanks for the idea.
Another reason this forum is so kick ***.
Thanks again Mike
In all honestly I'm relieved that someone with you vast experience and expertise isn't seeing a shortcoming going this route. I can't think of one, but that doesn't mean much at times. I'll be the first to tell ya I can have my crafty moments, but I don't know everything.
Well I fired off my LT where I stuck the pictures of what I had to modify on this cheap bender to get a decent product out of it. This kit is your typical budget minded all inclusive *********. Fortunately the core quality is actually pretty decent. I can tell you from first hand experience when machining the shoe that the casting is excellent all though the finish quality / outer coating is terrible. I did not see any porosity issues or flaws while or after re-cutting the radius. The steel was hard enough that with a 2 flute ball mill I could only plunge ten thou per cut. Then again a lot of that has to do with that crappy rotary table too. What I wish I had done was go two steps further and bored and sleeved the pivot then machined the shoe to really clean up the accuracy. But, it ain't bad right now.
As a electrical contractor I had the best of the best all the way up to 5" rigid benders. I took an insane amount of pride in how our projects turned out and when doing dozens to hundreds of conduits out of gear designed some really cool manifolds. My OCD would drive the guys insane. If I saw a guy installing pipe with a 6" torpedo, his *** was mine, anything less then a 4ft level and there better be a reason, string lines, plumb bobs, lasers, you name it I have/had it. I'd make them use gauges between conduits but when you'd drop back and look everything would look flawless. Yes, I can't live with myself if something is a 1/16th out, makes me crazy....
So guess how less then thrilled I was with the quality of the first bend right out of the box. I thought I had taken a picture of how cut up and dented the bend was with the stock die, but I can't find one and I tossed the first couple pieces already. I then took a die grinder with a 3/4" stone and cleaned up the major debris but found out two issues. First off the radius was still larger then I wanted and the bend had a wave/dip in it.
It wasn't until after squaring up and centering the rotary table and machining a mandrel did I identify all the problem areas. I should have used the lathe to first cut the outer shoulder of one side of the shoe, then flipping and bored the axis and sleeved it to reduce what I later discovered was a crappy ~.010 fit to the pivot post on the base. Then cut the radius of the shoe.
So what you'll see here is the 5/8" shoe which had a 1" smaller radius repurposed to 3/4". I've decided that as needed or if one day I'm really bored I'll do all of these in this fashion. It just means everything gets upsized one dimension......no big deal. But it will make for a very nice manual bender for future projects.
. So yesterday during our thunderstorm from hell I took a nice long break and caught the build off between the chicks and Lou/Jarad. The chicks were building a jeep and they had some one piece fender / body armor that the fender was made from a mandrel bent piece of 1" x 4" rectangular tubing. 
