Jeff Albro: Rebuilding the Grizzly Bender

Rebuilding the Grizzly Bender

"Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability... Better, stronger, faster."

I've tried benders from Grizzly, Harbor Freight, Micro-Mark, and even Di-Acro. I have never been happy with their ability to make a right-angled bend. They were all just designed wrong. I was looking for...

A die with a small radius. Not zero, but small. Metal (at least the 12 and 14 gauge metal I most frequently bend) doesn't bend like paper. If you have a sharp die all you get is a radiused bend with a dent on the inside.
A clamp that is easy to use, clamps near the point of the die, and doesn't interfere with the bending nose. The Di-Acro offset pin tended to cause the work to shift, and even with the spring loaded nose, the clamp interfered.
A bending nose that was simple, didn't interfere with the clamp, and could be adjusted near the point of the die.
A workstop that worked for repeatable bend locations.
A bendstop that worked for repeatable bend angles.

None of the benders I had used had met my requirements for a right angled bend. I knew what I wanted, but didn't have it. Building one from scratch would be expensive. The Grizzly Universal Bender had potential, but had been built wrong with a zero radius die and poorly positioned clamp and bending nose.

One day it came to me in the shower. I had the parts I needed in the Grizzly bender. They just needed to be put back together properly. I decided to go Monster Garage on my bender.

I removed the parts from the bender, put a 1/16" radius on the die tip with a belt sander, and super glued the parts in place. I figured the super glue would hold the parts together for the car trip to the welder. Great idea, except it turns out that whatever the die, clamp, and base were made of didn't like to be welded. They kept cracking. The nose was weldable.

I decided I would bolt the parts together. The die and the clamp already had holes. I used transfer punches to mark the center of the holes, and drilled and tapped the base for 3/8"-16 bolts. I could have used the original metric bolts, but I didn't have the correct tap. The base drilled and tapped easily.

The bolts gave the die enough slop to nudge it into place for final positioning. The center of the radiused die tip needs to be at the center or the bending nose rotation. This is easily checked by swinging the bending nose around and looking for constant spacing to the die. After it was perfect, another hole was drilled through the die into the base and the die was pinned in place.

Now the bender works like it should. The clamp and bending nose are close to the tip of the die, the die has just enough radius to get a good bend, and there is an easily used workstop that comes with the bender. The bendstop that came with the bender was junk, but it should be easy enough to mount a new one on the base.

Open and closed with no work in the bender.

Open and closed with 1/8" x 1" steel bar in the bender.