how do we bend a 90 in conduit [Music]
all right when you are bending a 90 the first thing that you want to do is figure out what
your dimension is for your 90s so say we have a an obstacle and we're trying to clear like we've
got a wall right here we need to figure out what that total distance is to the end of our 90 from
the beginning of the pipe so let's say that we want a 90 to bend at let's say like 36 inches
I'm going to go to the end of my conduit I'm going to go to 36 I'm going to draw a line
36 if I were just to bend right here is not going to end up being 36 so we have to do a take off for
three quarter inch conduit that means six inches for half inch conduit it's five inches for one
inch conduit it's eight inches this is all stuff if you have an ugly's book that is all in there so
um keep an uglies book around you but if like if you ever forget it's in there but I just know this
because I've been doing it for so many years so what I do is I take this six inches from my mark
and I go back and I draw another line so that shows me two things it shows me the end of where
the 90 should be once it's a 36 inch Bend but it shows me where to actually bend it to achieve that
now I'm writing on here with a sharpie marker just because for the video's sake I want y'all
to be able to actually see these lines when you're on the field though don't use a marker
it's really unprofessional because you're going to see all these lines all over your conduit to
keep it clean just use a pencil you can use a construction pencil and then you just rub
it off with your thumb now when you're doing this this whole takeoff method I'm going to
show you two different methods of bending 90s depending on which way your Bender's facing
but if you've just taken a measurement and you go back six inches that means your Bender needs
to face the direction you just hooked your tape measure onto so I hooked my tape measure there
so I'm going to sit here and bend facing where my tape measure just came from and now I'll show you
how to bend it one really important thing when you're bending conduit is you don't just pull
like this you actually need to step downward and push while you're pulling that's going to keep
the actual conduit tight inside of the shoe a lot of times when people bend it actually lifts the
conduit up and it kind of bends the whole pipe so you don't want to do that you want to make
sure that you're just applying it to the shape of the shoe now I'm using aluminum conduit so you're
going to notice that this is like super easy for me to bend compared to a steel conduit right now
since pricing is all crazy like there's actually a lot of advantages of using aluminum I mean a
it's light I can carry a whole huge bundle of aluminum onto a job site with no effort at all
steel is quite a bit heavier aluminum is a lot easier to bend where steel is very difficult to
bend especially once you get up into like inch and a half kind of sizes if you have aluminum you're
gonna have an easier time you might be struggling as much there's also the pulling of wire through
steel and aluminum usually pulling wire through Steels a lot easier than aluminum just depending
on the manufacturing processes but aluminum has a little bit more of a rub to it so when you're
pulling conductors through there's gonna be a little bit more friction but this was sent to
me by pen aluminum pen aluminum all they make is aluminum conduit they make aluminum rigid they
make aluminum EMT but they actually put a special coating inside of this called blue Lightning but
what that coating does is it actually applies a sort of Teflon coating on the inside of the
conduit so it makes pulling a lot easier it's like putting pulling Lube on the inside of a conduit
it's just not all like Mucky and slimy and gross so they make multiple different styles if you're
interested there's a link in the description below you can check out their conduit types but I am
a fan of using aluminum conduit especially just because of the price and the weight and the ease
of using it so that being said what I'm going to do next is I'm going to take my Bender And if you
notice vendors have a whole bunch of of little lines and marks things at the end of them this
right here this arrow is what you're going to want to line up with your line back here the arrow is
your 90 degree mark now if you're going to bend there's not actually a number 90 back here so
you're going to be bending this thing all the way down until this end of the shoe almost hits the
conduit not quite just almost if I were to bend like a 30 degree Bend you can see a line with 30
written upside down I would be bending back to the point where that line is parallel with the ground
and that's how I'm going to get a 30 degree Bend but we'll get more into that when we get into the
offsets so for right now just we need to make sure that our arrow is lined up with the front line
not the first line that had our measurement the front line where we took the six inches off
so I'm going to stick this in there and I'm going to line up two that line
all right again I'm going to be pushing with my foot straight down and I'm going to be pulling
back on the pipe at the same time so you don't have to go crazy and hard especially
since this is aluminum you don't want to Kink the conduit so you just want to roll it very neatly
like look how easy that bends and you notice I don't just do it all in one
like crazy motion again I don't want to Kink it so I kind of work it up as I go
check with my level we're off a little bit so I need to come up to right about there
little adjustments like that go a long way and boom that's level so you can see that the bottom
of the shoe is about an inch off the top of the conduit and that gets me level you'll get used to
that the more that you bend the more that you do these you kind of understand like every Bender is
going to be a little bit different so when you bend you like know how far you have to apply
pressure now I want to give a big shout out to pen aluminum thank you so much pen for sending me all
of this aluminum conduit and for sponsoring this video um so the benefits of working with aluminum
conduit a it's way lighter so like you wouldn't believe how much like a big stack of conduit
that you can lift up when it's aluminum it's so much lighter a lot easier to bend to so like if
you're used to bending like one inch inch and a quarter inch and a half conduit um being able to
bend aluminum versus like really like struggling with steel um so the benefit you know is obviously
it's lighter but but being able to bend it is such a huge thing there's even this coating that they
can put on the inside of the conduit that's called blue Lightning it's sort of like a Teflon coating
but it essentially makes pulling a lot easier on the inside of conduit a lot of times when you're
using aluminum conduit it it kind of catches more than the steel does so it's a little bit more
difficult to pull wire through sometimes but with a coating like this it comes through with a breeze
and the cost of aluminum versus the cost of Steel you're always going to pay less with aluminum
than you are with steel so just kind of across the board it makes sense to be using aluminum conduit
if you're interested in finding out more about pen aluminum or looking into their aluminum conduit
check the link in the description below all right the next pen we're going to do is pretty much the
same thing it's a 90 but instead of taking your measurement from the front and bending up using
the line that's on the front of the shoe of the Bender we're going to use the star on the Bender
and the way that we do this is that we Face the opposite direction so if I measure from that
way say right now I'm going to do like 78 inches all right we go from the end
put our Mark at 78 we do one Bend one Mark there's no takeoff or anything the important thing is to
remember when you're bending whatever way you came with the tape measure when you're using the
star you have to face away from that direction so pulled my measurement this way I'm going to bend
on the star and pull that side of the pipe up and it's still going to come to 78. so remember before
we pulled our measurement this way and bent this way this time we're pulling the measurement this
way keeping the Bender facing the opposite way of our tape measure and using the star so let's do it
now don't get confused because there is a little teardrop shape on some of these
and there's a star shape on some of these usually they'll both have it one of them is
for doing a saddle bend and the other one is for doing these backward 90s so just
make sure that the point of the star is on your line and same thing push down foreign
[Music]
but that's it that's a 90. all right so that's pretty easy that's a 90 there's
two different ways you can do it you can either do it the forward or the
backwards method one of them you just have to remember to subtract the other one you
can use the star so you don't have to do that whole subtraction math but thank you
for watching leave some comments below love you crazy people and I'll see in the next one