I also made a lot of stuff out of order, and assembled stuff multiple times to check fit, even when I knew I would have to disassemble it again. Note: Since this was my first time building a tubing roller, and since I was sort of making up the design as I went along, I made a few mistakes which resulted in a few unnecessary holes, poorly placed holes, and stuff like that.
I will also show you how to make your own dies, and I will update that section as I make more types of die sets. Other features include a jack to force the top die down and easily bend the tubing, guide bars and spacers to eliminate slop when rolling (slop is when a tube turns out all wonky because there was side-to-side motion in the roller dies while you were rolling), and bolts to securely fasten the roller to the table, among other things. My roller features multiple locations to place the bottom dies, allowing you to place them farther apart for larger radii, which in turn requires less effort to do the rolling. If you own a lathe, you can make your own roller dies for about $25-50 a set depending on the size of the dies. If you build just the roller, you can easily do it for around $300-400. I attempted to fix it to my satisfaction, was thwarted by non-standard part and thread sizes (again, typical harbor freight), and after looking into buying a new one and finding that a good one would run me upwards of $1,000, (for just the roller, die sets are about $200 each for good ones) or more (up to around $5,000) if I wanted anything fancy, I decided to build my own from scratch. The roller, of course, broke catastrophically the first time I tried to use it. First, though, a little background on how this project came about: After reading reviews of the harbor freight tubing roller, I figured it would be good enough for what I needed, and it was only $200, so I bought one.
Hello again everyone! In this instructable, I will be showing you how to build a roller-bender machine from scratch.