I am looking for a shop in the Sacramento, CA area that has a mandrel bender and will do a simple one time job. I need to have a piece of 2.25 diameter, 304 stainless tubing bent in two places. I am only looking for a shop with a mandrel bender. I am not interested in having the tubing bent on a Hossfeld style bender. Thanks.
http://www.upstreameng.com/ Google brought that up pretty quick, I've no experience with the company, many others listed in Sacramento as well.
Thanks for your reply. Yes, there are several shops in Sacramento that have mandrel benders. The problem is that mandrel benders are very expensive and the shops that have them are usually high volume shops and they want to concentrate on high volume customers. My posting was an attempt, on my part, to find a shop willing to do a one time, small job without disrupting a bunch of high volume shops that have no interest in this type of job. I try to be considerate of others peoples time.
Have you tried SPD exhaust in Rancho Cordova??? Its not going to be cheap and you will prob have to wait till the set-up for that size is in the machine, but you will have to call to see if interested, Plenty of bending houses here in LA that will do one offs, can it be shipped??
Thanks for the replies. I took my present exhaust and went to SPD. The people at SPD could't have been nicer. They have a great facility and their products are absolutely first class. I talked to the owner and showed him the exhaust and explained what I needed made... And what I needed made was a piece of 2.250 304 stainless tubing with 2 bends in a single plane. Very simple, very basic. The problem is/was that I only needed one. The set up on the machine is $300. If I were buying a thousand pieces the $300 would be spread over each piece adding only $.30 to each piece, which is reasonable enough. But I was only buying one so it would be $300 for the setup, plus materials, plus labor. I would easily be spending $400 to $500 for an exhaust pipe that went from the header to the muffler. Clearly too expensive for my budget. I wasn't upset or surprised. I used to own a similar sized business and understand how hard it is to accommodate someone who only needs one of a custom made product. Even if I had paid the $400 to $500 for the exhaust, the owner probably would have lost money on the deal. His shop, and probably most shops that have a true mandrel bender are set up for large volume business. Having someone like me wanting one of something is their worst nightmare. Anyway, a great shop, super nice owner, great quality and I wouldn't hesitate to buy one of their normal products. I did buy the mandrel bent tubing pieces to weld up my own exhaust pipe from them. It is easy for me to weld up my own pipe and because I realized that finding a shop that could help me by making a one piece, mandrel bent, exhaust pipe was probably a "fools errand". Thanks again for all the replies.
That's likely the best solution. We have a shop where I work that does a lot of mandrel bending. (A lot as in all day, every day). I drew up some radiator pipes for the flathead I'm putting in my project. Also two bends. I "ordered" them about a year ago and still nothing... They don't bend much 1.75" stuff and are waiting until they're set up for it again. (and have the time to mess with a two piece order)
DesmoDog is exactly right! The head engineer for a big silicone valley company that was a big customer of mine had a personal project he wanted done. He shows up at the door with a hose from his vacuum cleaner at home The hose needed to be repaired because it had a hole in it. Now, a normal person would buy a new hose. Not this guy. And to complete the picture, I wasn't in the hose business. My business was manufacturing huge amounts of wiring harnesses and cables for customers like Hewlett Packard. So this engineer knew that we have shrink tubing that ranged from 1/16 inch in diameter to perhaps 4 inches in diameter. All we needed to do, the engineer explained to me, was put a big piece of shrink tubing with adhesive, over the hole and shrink it down till it was tight with a heat gun. Ignoring for the moment that my time was valuable/expensive, let me explain how this project went from there. I stopped one of my best assemblers from what they were doing to give him instructions on what had to be done to fix the damn hose. He heads off to the stockroom to get the shrink tubing to fix the hose, while what he was originally working on lay on the bench awaiting completion. After getting the roll of 4" tubing from the stock room he then interrupted the person using the flat cable cutter that we used for cutting shrink tubing accurately and cleanly to size. So that job is also laying on the bench as the machine was adjusted to cut this one piece of string tubing. Once the tubing was cut he had to find a heat gun to shrink the tubing. So another assembler's job was interrupted as the heat gun they were using was now used to shrink the tubing around the hose. Now, all that was left was to present the hose to the engineer who was waiting in the lobby flirting with the receptionist and keeping her from doing her work. The engineer was happy with the repair and I think he even said thank you. I could have bought that engineer 4 brand new vacuum cleaner hoses and been money ahead. Five employees had what they were supposed to be doing interrupted, a piece of 4" diameter hose coated internally with adhesive, 12 inches long (not cheap), lost revenue from idle jobs, lost profit opportunities, wages and benefits, overhead etc. It all adds up. I try to be considerate of other peoples time. I try to match any job I need done by someone else to the correct size business. And most of all, I try to do everything myself.
I had a few inconsiderate morons grace my shop with self-serving requests, so am not surprised. The final straw had to be the engineer flirting with your receptionist. Brought me to a wry grin...I immediately recalled most of those 'favors'!
I'm a little late to the party, but I've been able to source my mandrel bent pieces pretty much at will from Summitracing(sure, I sometimes need to adjust my desired sizes to be in line with their available sizes, but that's part of any prototyping.... LOL!!!)
The original exhaust was made of mandrel bent pieces. I was trying to get the opportunities for problems reduced from 5 pieces to 1 piece and clean up the look of the exhaust. At this point I have resigned myself to making the new exhaust out of mandrel bent pieces just like the old one. I always strive to use the best solution rather than the easy solution. As I mentioned above,I have already bought the mandrel bent pieces to make the exhaust the way it was before.
better buy one of those plastic mock up kits where you can mock all the tubes up w/ "snap together' joints
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