Bender experience.

[Seb1981]

Who has experience with the Ub-5h universal bender from Shop Outfitters? I am curious about them. I am considering it for numerous projects but I have no clue on If it's a good tool or price. For the bender and several dies for square and round tubing and pipe plus some other implements it's about 6 grand. If anyone has any info on these I'd really love to hear good or bad. Thanks.

 

[619DioFan]

Never heard of this company but Harbour freight sell a version of that designed for round stock and flat stock that has good reviews. costs about 100.00 ( manually operated ) they also sell a pipe bender ( 12 and 16 ton version ) works decent as long as you take your time ( we built a full cage for my friends rock crawler with one ) unless you are running a pro shop I don't know if dropping 6 grand on a bender would be worth it. just my thoughts. welcome to GJ.

 

[rsanter]

That bender and the one at HF are only distant cousins. I have the HF one and it does ok but dosent really come with much in the way of dies.
The type of bender you are looking at is a HOSFIELD. Before I spent $6000 on that one I would start looking for a nice used one that has a lot of tooling. All the big money is in the tooling and dies. The actual bender is easy to make

Bob

 

[Seb1981]

Thanks guys! I appreciate the feed back. And it's good to know that the harbor freight one will make a cage. We weren't sure it could do 90s. Thanks again.

 

[cyato]

We bought the UB-5H bender at the last shop I was with and it is a great bender. The quality and craftsmanship are top notch. It bends round tube, square tube and flat bar. The size and capability of the round and square tube is based on which die sets you purchase. You can also buy the bender without the hydraulics (which can be added later), which is the UB-5. The construction quality, accuracy of the bends and the instruction manual is leagues above the HF bender, when it comes to bending flat bar. If you're not interested in bending flat bar and brackets, the JDSquared tubing bender seems very popular, just isn't setup to bend flat brackets from what I can see.

 

[619DioFan]

Thanks guys! I appreciate the feed back. And it's good to know that the harbor freight one will make a cage. We weren't sure it could do 90s. Thanks again.

If you get a tube/pipe bender from HF and are going to try 90 degree bends a trick to keeping the tubing from kinking is to fill it with sand and then cap the ends prior to making a sharp bend ( learned this trick on youtube ) and yes we kinked a few before seeing this .

 

[70C-10]

Would this fit your needs ?

www.probender.com