in this video i'll show you how i took this engine stand and convert it into a two bender stand.
now this would allow me to switch easily from the vertical or horizontal position when bending tube.
but it needed a few little tweaks to fit my needs the main one it seemed
like this engine stand had a slight angle i wanted to make that 90 or perpendicular
and it seemed like the back of the stand set about a quarter inch lower than the front and
because i wanted to save some space in my garage i wanted to slide under and fit under this rack
so next was to pretty much break it down i pretty much wanted to get the main arm
so that i can easily clamp it down into the bandsaw to cut it down to length
so once i got the base off pretty much take it over to my table vice
and use a cut off wheel to trim it all off
to take off the remaining metal pretty much took it over to my belt
grinder and pretty much stand it all flush
to make the actual mount that attaches the tube bender to the actual engine stand for
the head of the engine stand i pretty much use some three by five by quarter inch wall
angle this would be the piece needed to connect the tub3 bender and the engine stand together
then i pretty much took the angle and marked out where the holes needed to be
from the slots and drilled two holes
so this is how it looks like all mounted up
i'll probably add a little gusset uh to better support it
so next was to locate the hole locations from the actual tube benders so that i can actually figure
out where i'm gonna need to drill the next set of holes so after i drilled those holes
i just grabbed some scrap plate and reinforced the mount even further
now let's do a quick fit test i added some quarter inch plate here
uh at the base so that it would offset the back a little bit to make it more level
before i would go any further i want to do a quick dry run to make sure
i cleared everything so i hooked up the tube bender to some air and gave it a quick run
it was pretty close here but i figured you know i probably could have
shifted up the angle bracket up a little higher so it'd clear
but it seemed to work it's about a quarter inch clearance so i think that should be fine
to make the mount more stout i decided to pretty much uh
weld it flush instead of just relying on the actual bolts because i knew over time it
would sag so i cleaned off the paint and you know tacked a few beads in there so that it would hold
next was to get rid of this wobble at the base
originally there's a bolt that kind of holds it all together
but it doesn't really do a good job so i figured i'd make it more permanent and weld that
permanently to keep the uh head locked in the vertical position i had to drill out a second hole
for the uh the locking pin i wanted to use the same hole but there wasn't enough meat on the uh
the head part so i just end up drilling a new set of holes in the back so here's a quick
demo of how it all works in the horizontal configuration and moving to the vertical
configuration
one thing i'll add to the stand is probably some locking casters this would kind of make
it easier to keep it stationary while i switch from horizontal to vertical
now is to run some tubing it and see how this all bends
so originally i was using a bolt as a pin but then i switched over to this hitch pin
and you can see when the two bending was moving it bent a little bit um luckily i was able to
still make it work so uh let's grab some longer stuff uh i think this is like a 10 foot stick but
you know let's say you had a a 20 foot stick and you're you're building a roll cage
bending it in this horizontal position would be kind of tricky you can see here i just
kind of exaggerated this a little bit but imagine let's say you had equipment on the
side and you couldn't bend that way i think flipping it to the uh the vertical position
will work a little bit better this would allow you to bend something long upwards taking advantage of
that vertical space especially if you don't have the uh i guess the horizontal space
at the end of the day it mainly is user preference but just having the ability to bend in the
horizontal or vertical position it's nice to have and you'll never know when you'll need it
anyways i hope you found this information helpful um if i missed something let me know
in the comment section or if you guys have any questions i'll do my best to answer them
and as always i got to end it with my son helping me out you can see he's pretty
much the right height for this tube bender as well so he can probably use it down the road
got a few more products down the pipeline hopefully we can do maybe a go-kart
one day together but right now i got this uh tube bender stand built so i can build some custom
sliders for my toyota for runner so stay tuned for that one i'll see you guys in the next one