Any lathe guru's out there ?

[Greg Rust]

Awesome- thirteen grams saved!!!1

Yea more wank than anything really but when you have this stuff lying around as scrap, then it's really the only way to go!!!

Had a quick go at polishing it last night and it should come up ok.

[chartreusehj]

... I'll probably end up just sand-bending them .

Now this im interested in!

[dave1600]

I used to restore vintage bikes, watched an old bloke make the exhaust pipe for the first one I restored, and then managed to make a few myself using this technique (old bloke had died by the time I needed pipes for the next bike).

Took me a while to get it right (and I still turn out my share of duds), but basically -

Fill pipe with dry sand and ram it in tight.
Cap both ends of pipe.
Heat pipe with oxy.
Apply force to bend hot pipe.

The sand stops the pipe collapsing on itself and produces a nice, almost mandrel type bend.

Goes through a truckload of oxy / acetylene though

[Billzilla]

Goes through a truckload of oxy / acetylene though

We sand-bent the pipes for the extractors on the race car engine ..... never again! But what we did have a big vacuum cleaner with the hose connected to the outlet blowing into a drum full of charcoal, to make it very hot.