cnc controlled mandrel bender controlled by mach3

hi well i have decided to try my best to design a cnc controlled mandrel bender for well bending tube (tube chaissis, motorcycle go-cart, buggy ect) by posting this it should keep me on track, from what i can find there has been alot of asking but no trying so ,(unless i am wrong) i am going to try, in the next couple weeks i am going to build the madrel bender, with electric over hydrolic and try designing the machine my thoughts so far are as follows.

x will be to move the pipe forward towards being bent

y will be rotation of said pipe

x hopefully will be an encoder ect to stop the bend at certain amount ( 90 degrees ect).

i will use mach 3 since i use it for my plasma cutter / router

im not shure about producing the g code but even if i can jog a foot bend to 45 degrees rotate 40 degrees jog 2 feet bend 90 degrees with the keys than i will be happy at first.

next would be building a screen set for mach 3

and then hopefully software to make g-code so i dont have to type it out

any input or anyone wanting on the band wagon chime in


thanks again

tim

Hi I am interested. What a mind bender this is. Center line radii to gcode mmm, but what the hell

Paul

We had a computerized bender where I used to work, it was a 3 wheel job with the center wheel moving up and down. The center wheel moved with hydraulics, and had a gear rack that drove an encoder. We did have issues with accuracy. The machine tried to 'learn' when to shut off the hydraulic valve so that it ends up in the right spot. The cylinder had a flow control that had to be adjusted for different operations. The timing for the solenoid valve would be different every time you adjusted flow, so I think we would try to run it a cycle after making an adjustment to allow it to learn. Positioning error I think was around 10 to 20 thou, which made a big difference with what we were doing.
May not be an issue with what you are doing, but I thought it might be helpful
Good luck

Joe

just keeping this alive, hope towork on it soon

Hi guys

have a look at this site for ideas www.offroadfabnet.com go into the forum section under Benders and Bending , some guys have already designed cnc_mandrel_tube_benders

it is free to jion the website also

There are a lot of cnczone.com memmbers there also

cheers

Hi Timmy

hows things going on in this thread?

have a look at theses forums and websites http://www.offroadfabnet.com/forums/...read.php?t=218

and some where in this blog there is a cnc mandrel tube bender built from scratch http://www.thewarfields.com/cnccookb...logSep2006.htm just have to find it

if i find it again i will post it in here

cheers