On the other hand if you’re just building Chopper frames the unit described herein may be the low-buck solution you’ve been looking for. If you need a more general-purpose bender for a wide variety of general fabrication purposes you’ll be time and money ahead to just buy one from any of several different manufacturers. This bender is not designed to build 1.75” diameter heavy wall DOM roll cages for dragsters or 4-inch diameter bumpers for an off road 4x4. The bender outlined herein is less expensive than most because it’s designed for a very specific purpose that has well defined limits dictated by the product it’s supposed to produce.

Even the overseas copycats can’t cut them back much more to reduce costs than the American makers have already done. The reason that we don’t see cheap ‘imported’ compression benders is that you can only downgrade a bender so far and then it simply won’t work no matter what you do and most domestic benders are already built at the raw edge of providing satisfactory performance. Dollar for dollar and pound for pound there is no way a person can build a less expensive or simpler bender that produces professional results than what we’ll outline in this article. This is a proven design that does what it’s supposed to do unlike many of the other bender ‘plans’ on the Internet which might look good at first glance but end up either costing more than a pre-made bender or producing less than satisfactory results. It borrows bits and pieces from several different contributors and manufacturers. The design shown herein was developed over a long period of time and was a collaborative creation between several of us who post at the various discussion boards.

How much less depends upon the fabricators resources.

The term ‘low cost’ doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily cheap to build, just less expensive than a comparable store-bought unit. The Chopper Builders Handbook Tube Bender The CBH Tube bender is a low cost and simplified version of a typical compression type bender such as the JD 2 model III, the Pro-Tools model 105 or the ones made by JMR or Shop Outfitters.

Chopper builders handbook pdf download