Journey to the Baja 1000 - Episode 10 - Part 1: Building the Roll Cage with Bend-Tech

on this episode of the journey to the baja 1000 the race is on to get the truck finished and we're starting on the roll cage for the j-10 race truck you're watching the journey to the baja [Music] 1000 hey folks welcome to this 10th episode of the journey to the baja 1000. i can't believe we're already at uh number 10 i think 12 overall if you include the uh the tool tips today we're going to start the part the two-part series of using the bendtech software to make the roll cage for the jeep j10 racetrack so as i've said before and help my videos i'm not a professional so there's a lot of learning that goes along as i go through this especially with a plasma table never used one of those before making sheet metal do what i wanted to do and then today starting with the bentek software and making tube still take the shapes that i wanted to take there are some lessons learned along the way we're going to go ahead and get started with the first episode where i'm going to make the uh hoop for the b pillar which you already see behind me and see how many times it took me to get through that and also some lessons learned along the way let me first take a couple minutes to catch you up to date on how i prepared the body to take the roll cage well it might be time to clean my garage now let me show you what i've been doing you kind of see the mess down here so what i did is i want to mate this body to the to the roll cage so i had cut out a little bit of the existing body parts obviously the whole floor is out what i did is i squared off these brackets that used to hold on mounts to the other body and as you can see as i come over to this side what i'm doing is is putting in just a piece of angle iron which i'll weld across the top and the bottom and a couple of rosette welds and then use those perches which i squared off to also strengthen that and this will be how i at least mount the bottom of the body to the roll cage and i think it'll be pretty good there'll be a couple other mounting spots up near the dashboard and also in the old seat belt uh mounting brackets i'll be mounting it up there also so this isn't the only spot but i think this will be pretty solid once it's all welded together all right cutting out some brackets for the body uh out of some 1 8 inch steel plate let's go ahead and take them over to the press break and get these bent all right burning a little bit of midnight oil here making some of these uh brackets in the press break first i'm gonna do is pop it in there and uh put it first close to 90 degree bend it doesn't be perfect just because of the uh the weird shape of this um this piece it's kind of been a little bit weird i'm gonna go ahead and come back in here in a second pass with a piece of angle iron to get a perfect 90 degree bender pretty close to it so first i'll hit it with this one and then once i can kind of see that [Music] that the band is a little bit it's not perfect go back in there a small piece of angle iron that's like some 3 16 angle iron it kind of just see itself in there partially close very good and now nice 90 degree angle and flatten that piece out well i probably promote this uh band saw almost every time i use it on on the videos but it's just so great it just makes cutting so fast i think really accurate also the fact that i can you know measure from both sides um it's just really easy to get accurate cuts with the uh the band saw i did have somebody also ask me about my metal rack that i'm i'm using uh and it works pretty good there's some couple designs i would i would change on it you can kind of see there's some uh there was an original design i just keep adding supports on i've added extra wheels on the back and those kinds of things if i had to build it over again i'd build a lot better basically to handle the weight especially the weight that i put up high on the bandsaw i'm sorry on the the metal rack so from here now i'm just putting those tabs onto that piece of angle iron that i already have on the body and then i'm bringing that the tube in and i'm going to weld the tube to those tabs and that'll be the starting point for where i build the uh the roll cage from so i wanted to make this video to share with you some of my experiences in using the bentek software and also trying to get the basic the b pillar or the main hoop uh made for the j-10 race truck i'm gonna show you some of the things i did i made some errors and it's cool that i made some errors i'm blowing through a little bit of metal and maybe wasting a little bit but i figured that's what education is all about a little bit of experience and doing it a couple times you probably ruined a couple pieces of metal let me show you what i did uh and how i made the errors and then how i'm going to try and fix it on attempt number three of making this uh this main hoop so while bending the first two attempts at the main hoop there was two big errors that i made the first one was the orientation of the tube feeding into the uh the bender and i'll show you the bend here in a second i was taking into account the rotational angle of the tube as it went in it was always going in at the same degrees i set this thing at zero if you're interested to know how i made this tool where i measure the rotational angle of the tube going in check out my video on 3d printers and it shows how i made this if you're interested in that let me know in the comments i can or pm me and i can go ahead and send you the uh the file so you can print one of those out your yourself if you have a 3d printer uh the problem that i did while i was working on the rotational angle what i failed to do was uh make the tube level going in so that as a tube went into the bender it kind of came out at an angle and it was just enough that by 10 made four bends and came all the way around it was about five degrees of difference it was noticeably different i tried to see if i couldn't bend it back into place it just wasn't going to happen that's now it's going to be smaller pieces of tubing there's this tube here also and the error i made with this one is i just i calculated for four degrees of spring back with a test piece of metal and i've been some metal before but this is more complex than most of the stuff i've bent i just assumed that it would be four degrees of steam spring back everywhere and as it turns out as i and a lot of guys are saying yeah no kidding but i didn't know this and so let me show this with some folks uh on the larger bends you're gonna have more spring back and as it turns out i have more like from the way i set up my tool i have more like six degrees of spring back and then on the smaller bends i'm down to two degrees of spring back so i'm going to bend the tube again because with this one i thought wow i can actually fix that i could actually pull the tube together weld it and then get my hydraulic pressing here and push it out and then be putting a lot of stresses on the material a whole lot to make that happen and there are a lot of guys going to be riding inside this truck and it's just worth it to me if i could have been through you know another couple of those maybe you know be a hundred bucks or something like that for that medal it's worth it you know this is probably one of the most uh critical parts of the roll cage you know sitting right over top of your head i want to make sure i get this right it costs me a couple of bucks we'll go do that let's go ahead and take a look in the shop and i'll go walk through the steps and i'll give you a kind of a play by play what i do to get the bends right so again learning from some of my mistakes or just learning how to make things more efficient here's a tube i'm going to be bending and i'm using the bentek software and i'll show you more about how i use that in later videos it does give you the location you need to start the bend and the number of degrees that you uh you have to to bend each one of the tubes one of the things i am doing is i'm modifying the numbers here just a little bit because i'm going to put the fish mouths at the bottom of this tube before i bend it so i don't bring the my fish mouthing tool over to an already bent bar i can benefit and that'll be a lot easier so i did that math i did it on a piece of paper here uh unfortunately the the program if you see here it gives you everything in decimal so i just went ahead and put that all in 16th of an inch so when i actually go and transcribe that to a piece of tubing i already have those numbers here and i subtracted the quarter inch all the way across and i can explain why i did that later also spring back is not accounted for in the program so what i did is i took that tube i just did and i've i just basically made myself a chart for every bend i do in this thing i'm gonna start keeping a list i'm using a two inch round tube bender with a six and a half inch radius so the first couple tubes i did i set a desired bend of i wanted 73 degrees out of that bend i bent them to 77 degrees and my result was 71 degrees so there was six degrees of spring back that i needed to account for i tried to bend 17 degrees i bent them to 21 degrees thinking four degrees of spring back was going to happen but that's not what happened at all i over bent those things so i under bent and i over bent and so i'm gonna go through now and i'm gonna i'm gonna bend these things again with some better spring back numbers and let's go ahead and check out how the results look so here is the tube bender that i am using for all the bends i'm using the jd squared model 32 i'll try and put a link to that in my in my description below inside here i just happen to have my two inch six and a half radius uh die in here and this will bend to 180 degrees since i am doing two inch tubing i did uh get the years ago i got this but i have the hydraulic uh ram in here puts 20 000 pounds of force on this die uh i will just say that if you're probably bending anything over maybe an inch and a quarter inch and a half there's just no way you're going to do it by hand some guys will bolt these things to the floor use big old bars and try to get themselves some more leverage it just isn't going to work with the two inch tube you'll never get there the the hydraulic is the way to go for that and besides that on the table this is custom made i made this just to kind of hold some of my the tools i have all the time uh the wrench and all that kind of stuff pretty simple uh little tool there's also i want to say this comes from swag offroad this plate here that i had to weld on and that lets you kind of reorient the whole tube bender on whatever post you weld it to that's a pretty nice little uh nice little feature there all right i got the two inch tube on the uh my stand it's also in my bandsaw it goes out the door because it's so long doesn't actually fit in the room here um and i got all the points marked off a little tip here i don't know if anyone else does this but if you have problems with your tape measure of falling off your tube while you're trying to measure it put a rubber band around it and then i got that sheet with all the dimensions and i just went ahead and marked off those things now these marks obviously i'm using a big black sharpie pen it's a wide mark but i just try to what i do is when i cut it or whatever i'm going to do to this i'm going to bend in this case i'm going to shoot for the middle of that wide mark it gets me pretty uh close for that right now ready to cut it step one for this thing is to notch the tube um over here i have the tube all clamped into the beast by uh jd square this thing is awesome um i have the marks that i oriented for the bends they're all to 90 degrees because i want when i put this thing into my tube bender i want all these marks on the top so i can index them off the the notcher or i'm sorry off the the bender and then over here i have that angle cube and it says there it's at 90 degrees so it's rotated 90 degrees and you'll ask why i have it oriented this way so that when i put it into the bender i want that thing to be vertical and i want to always read zero so i have to start with it at a 90 degree angle there just so i can make it easier for me to read as i'm starting the bends and i'll show you that once i get to it okay now i got the piece of metal set up here and i'm pretty much ready to start bending uh the other tubing i just want to show you some of the again the lessons learned i had from last time was that when i set the tube up into the bender on this side i was not feeding it in vertical and you can see now i got that thing perfectly i'm sorry horizontal going into the the bender and then all the way down here at the end you can see now i have the angle cube set up it's 0.4 degrees off that's you know you can go back and forth all day long trying to get it perfect that's close enough for for me but now you can see as i start pulling that thing into the bender uh over here i can look down and pull the tube to the next notch and i can see the degrees on the other bender also right inside here you really can't see it but all those marks i made are up against the uh this two inch tube die here and that's what you have to index that off the next thing i'm going to do is just take up the the slack on the other bender with the hydraulic and i'll show you me doing that and then bend it to the correct number of degrees that i've calculated to make sure that i get the bend i want in accounting for the the spring brack so this is where my uh tube comes around hits my phone knocks it over and breaks my phone i'm such an idiot anyway uh so i don't have any more video of the thing being done here's some still pictures of the final product and i'm able to hit it now within a fraction of a degree and about a sixteenth of an inch everything's hitting perfect and i get better on part two when i do my next video showing you how to make bends and cuts on the same piece of tubing well it only took a couple tries to get it right on the the b pillar and i went through some metal and that's cool it's such a critical part need to get that right and by time i was done i was hitting my bend angles within about a fraction of a degree and i was also hitting the dimensions within about 16 of an inch which i think is pretty good and i go through the rest of the tubes i'm going to try to continue tightening up those tolerances again every time you're off here or there it makes weld gaps anytime you got to weld a gap you're compromising strength and you're also pulling that metal around a lot more just and changing the structure that you're building so in the future episodes we're going to try and uh make it even tighter well i hope you learned something in this part one of two of using the bentek software we'll see you in the next episode please don't forget to hit the like and subscribe button take care of yourself [Music] [Music] you

Channel: NTD Racing

Views: 3,624

Keywords: tube, chassis, bender, notching, bend-tech, software

Id: KN1ToKZ3qxg

Length: 16min 19sec (979 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 27 2020