One of my All-Time Favorite Sculptures, Which Isn't…

Of all the sculpture I've done, one of my favorites is the one pictured below—except, it isn't actually a sculpture—it's a bending tool I built last winter. What I love about this thing is that although I threw it together one evening to get a job done, it comes across as one of the more successful  primitive figure sculptures I've ever pulled off. Sometimes, I guess you luck out... The holes that represent eyes and mouth were already there in the salvaged steel I used for the main part of the "head." The four pieces sticking up like hair are the bending pins. There are two sets, spaced differently to work with different thicknesses of rod. What looks like an arm hanging down is another bending tool that I sometimes use in concert with the pins on complex curves—it isn't attached permanently, it just hangs there from the tighter of it's own two sets of pins (seen more clearly in the third pic).

People frequently ask how I go about bending steel. It's pretty simple really: I stick a rod between one set of the pins sticking up on the bender's "head." I move the rod through the pins to adjust where I'm putting the bend, and leverage the rod against the pins to bend it. For a very tight bend, near the end of a rod, I might slip a piece of pipe over the short part of the rod to give me more leverage. For more complex bends, involving multiple curves, or when I need to adjust the bend to make it tighter or looser I use the secondary bender (the arm).

I almost never heat rod for bends unless it's thicker than 5/8 inches, or when I need to make a really sharp 90 degree or more bend. Not all metalworkers will agree with me on this point, but I have found that bending the steel cold gives me much greater control over the grace of the curve. The slower and more difficult it is to bend the steel, the less likely you are to put a kink in it (which is just about impossible to fix once you've done it).

The only part of bending that can be difficult with this tool is keeping the steel from twisting as you bend it—it's very important to make sure you hold the rod level as you work. The longer the rod is, the more difficult this becomes, especially with thinner rod which has a tendency to flex downward (weight combined with flexibility). The corollary of this is that it can become quite difficult to bend a rod on more than one axis—when you are putting bends in multiple directions it is sometimes not possible to get good leverage, as the work piece will slip between the pins. One solution for that problem is to clamp the piece in a vice and work it. I once broke the central shaft on a 6000 pound vice while trying to bend a piece of 1/2 inch rod (and wound up with a lot of stitches in the process) so I can't really recommend that solution too highly.

When I built this tool last winter, I designed the stand (or body) so it could double for my other, commercially manufactured bending tool, a "complex bender" from Harbor Freight. All that's required is to undo four bolts, switch tools and go. The complex bender took a direct hit from the main roof beam when the studio fell in and has yet to be replaced. Most of the time I prefer the home built tool anyway. What the complex bender did which mine does not, was allow cold bends of 90 degrees and very nice rounded curves if you only needed a 3 inch diameter or less. It was handy to have both...

Just for the record, I did not paint the pattern on the floor in these pics. It was there when I moved in. It was obviously intended to look like flagstones, but to me it looks like either watermelon or steaks, and for some reason that really creeps me out…