We use Bend-Tech Pro and an angle grinder to build a Custom Pre-Runner Jeep J10

on this episode of the journey to the baja 1000 we use bentek and a couple of angle grinders to build the roll cage for the j-10 race truck [Music] hey folks my name is dave welcome to this 11th edition of the journey to the baja 1000 this episode is going to be a part two of using the bentek software and we're getting better at using it making the roll cage for the j-10 race truck what i'm going to show you today is that there's basically two different things i am doing with the bentek software i'm either cutting a tube on both ends where i have a bend in the middle or i don't have a bed in the middle and you're going to see that there the way you do that is different for both of those it'll probably cover 90 of the cages that you might be making for yourself in your own garage let's go ahead and start looking at how i find pick points we'll take a look at the software and then also get to the actual physical cutting and bending of the tubes let's start with the the pick points so i'm going to do my best to explain what i'm doing with pick points now pick points are the way that bend tech sets like the locations for all the tubes so right now i'm trying to build what is the other a pillar so it's going to start right down here it's going to go up the side of the door and then the a pillar i'll go parallel to this old part of the truck right here across the top and then connect to the b pillar hoop now the the challenges with the the pick points is that the pick points are in this case where there's a bend it is the point where if you continue the two tubes where those tubes would intersect not necessarily where it's actually going to be because that tube's going to make a bend and it's going to be inside that pick point so you really got to be careful as you measure this that you you bring it all the way up you know so you don't have the tube sitting too far inside as you you make your pick point you're not picking where the bend is going to be it's here where the intersection of the tubes would be uh so some of the things i'm using here just some you know some tape i'm using a level to get a vertical tube off of there to figure out where it would stop and then also my favorite tools uh i'm using a magnet to hang my grandfather's old plum bob right there and i'll use that plumb bob to figure out exactly where that pick point is going to land because what you need to do is you need to be able to anchor the pick point off of something what i'm going to do is this point right here this is a good point inside my computer and so now i know like for example the point that's going up here is going 24 inches vertically it's going to be totally 90 degrees from this tube but it's got to come out about two inches horizontally and that's where that point will be and then now you can see i'm using this the ruler right here to figure out where this plumb bob lands and again i will measure off at this point it'll be what about you know 15 inches this way four or five inches this way and then about you know maybe uh 35 inches up whatever that ends up being uh for that pick point and that's the stuff that we're going to put into the bentek software let's go ahead and take a look at how that goes into the bent tick first the two different ways we're going to cut tubes today the first one being fish mouth on both ends straight tube the second one being fish mouth on straight both ends with a bend in the middle here's the first one i want to cut out this tube i actually have almost all the other ones in there and since i'm getting pretty good the process let me show you what i learned along the way on how to make this go pretty uh pretty smoothly i will say that what you need to do is you need to go in there and as you cut bend and all those stuff and welt tech all these other tubes in there you need to go back and verify that your pick points that you've put in are accurate if they've moved because of welding that's pulled them around or something like that even by quarter of an inch you got to go in there and adjust it otherwise all the other tubes are going to be jamming them in there and using hydraulics to pull this for this thing around so keep those updated as you go and it won't be uh too big of a task so i want to cut out um this tube right here i need to cut them in relation to the other tubes that are out there so i'm going to go to the cutting menu and i'm going to say make a new cut now so i have the other ones in there i got to cut this one in relation to the other tube so i'm going to say i'm going to cut that tube i'm going to cut it in relation to that one uh you know what i don't want that one and pretty much that one and i'm gonna say complete that cut and now i can zoom in and verify yep it looks like those fish mouths are in the correct orientation for this tube so that looks uh good i'm going to cut the other side it's a new cut i'm going to cut this tube and the kind of relation that tube that tube and that tube and say complete that and again i'm going to zoom in and that looks like it will cut it all in the way i want obviously i didn't need that one it didn't go down there that far i just put it in there for just in case because you never know sometimes the tube actually reaches down and touches it you just didn't realize it did and you got to go back and cut it so it might as well just click all the tubes that it might actually touch from there now it drops these cuts down over here i double click on them and now i can print that one out and then i can double click on that one i can print that one out and then i'll cut out the templates let me show you how i put them on efficiently and cut the tube to the correct length before i cut the fish mouths all right so just a couple thoughts as i get into the cutting of these pieces of paper first off this tool i have is something my six-year-old boy told me to get and it is just obviously just cuts paper straight but it is awesome because there's a little line on there and you can put it on top the lines on the paper that you want to cut and it nails it exactly and that brings me to the when you're cutting this thing realize that any error you have will translate to errors later on as you're trying to cut the tube and weld the tube so i always say aim small miss small i think that was out of a movie patriot or something like that but uh you really got to try it now as closely as you can i will leave as i'm cutting a little bit of hangover too like as i make this first cut right here generally i will leave about a quarter of an inch on the side of that that cut to make the second cut i will generally also leave a quarter of an inch on the side of that cut but as i hit this third cut i will try to nail it right on the line and that way when i wrap it i have a little bit of overlap on the wrap it just helps me close the wrap around the other tube a little bit better and here's the the tedious part and you got to do this for everyone i think i probably cut over 200 of these uh so far is i am trying to as i cut this out i'm trying to split the black line with uh with the scissors so i'm doing the best that i can to cut that thing right down the black line all the way around again aim small miss small because this translates to where you're going to cut where you're going to grind and later on the joints that you're going to try to well and if you hit these perfect i'm telling you it will you'll you'll have almost a zero gap yeah i can just barely sometimes stick my fingernail in the gap that it leaves on the tubes right because i fit them together before i start to weld so on these pieces of paper that i just cut out there's a couple numbers on there but the ones that really matter are this top one where it says 22 inches the 25 and a quarter down the bottom distance to the end i just don't care about what i want to know is what is the distance between that line and that line once it's on the tube what i will do is i'll mark it off and again this little piece of aluminum this straight edge that i got probably from home depot or something like that it's a lightweight piece of angle iron and i'll mark it on that so i can transfer it accurately onto the tube okay so how do i know what length i need to cut the tubes well first thing i'll do is those pieces of paper i just cut out i will go ahead and lay those on my table and then that piece of angle of aluminum where i've marked out 22 inches i will line up the lines with that so now i will know how long that tube needs to be at that point i'm just going to measure the distance between the extremes of the fish mouths on both sides and i'll take that measurement over to my bandsaw and cut it there's might be some numbers in the computer program i just find that this was the best way to waste the least amount of uh tube as i was cutting them so before i put the paper sleeves onto the other tubes i will actually prep them for welding and that does two things ones that makes it just so much easier because it's in it's an easy position to get right now so i'll use some scotch brite to clean off all the mill scale and then just a little bit of acetone but then it also makes it such that it takes the sharpie ink a little bit better it doesn't wipe off so easily with the clean bare metal all right now the tube is cleaned up and ready to go i'm gonna take both the piece of papers and i'm gonna go ahead and start putting those on the uh the tube um making sure that i line up especially this reference line all the way around and then i'm gonna get a piece of tape which you should have pre-cut ready to go on there i'm gonna try and make this this tube a little bit snug on there so it doesn't slide around after i after i put it into place now we'll just put both sides on at the same time no need to line up anything just yet line that line up as best you can all right now the reference lines just visually i'm going to go ahead and i know that these piece of papers go pretty close to the ends i'm going to try to visually line them up as best i can now this is where i'm going to take this uh piece of angle iron again i already have the 22 inches marked off on here and now i'm going to do is i'm going to put that right in one of the corners and line that up over here and then once it's there now i can go ahead and just take this sleeve and just slide it until it is lined up you know if one of them slides better than the other what i'll do like this one's really tight so what i might do is now go back and line this one up on the 22 and i'll rotate this one to get it in place and once this one is right on that corner realize that this is going to the course's angle iron lines itself up automatically it's going right down i'm lining up this longitudinal line i'm also lining up this radial line here on the end this one on the 22 and now these things are perfectly indexed with each other and now i can mark on the tube and get ready to cut all right i'm ready to mark this thing i usually go through and i'm a little bit neurotic here but i uh i triple check this thing to make sure that i'm lined up because i'm not doing a lot of cutting on this and i still want to waste the other time another thing i'll do before i mark up the tubes i might just mark across the paper onto the tube and that will give me a reference i can look back later and if that that sleeve rotated while i was marking the tube or something like that i will see that on that mark right there and then from there i just kind of start marking the uh the edge of the tube what i will do is sometimes i'll run along the seam a lot of times if i get it especially to a corner what i'll do is i'll run the pen off of the paper basically pushing the paper down as i'm marking it that does a pretty good job of leaving a pretty sharp line all the way around that too i'm trying to keep it as black as possible because i make it easier to see once i start cutting it i have tried doing this with a uh a pink pen just didn't work i mean it worked okay i just didn't see the value in it i had a couple of those and it just the sharpie does just about as good you don't have to deal with the uh getting the paint uh on there and letting it dry and all that kind of stuff so i'm kind of sticking with a sharpie it seems to be doing pretty good job ready good [Music] okay i just wanted to do a quick little overview of what i do to make parts off of ben tech and i'm taking one of the more complicated ones which is my a pillar uh and i'll have to say that i did it perfect the first time actually this is my third one the second one came out pretty good so this is the third one the first one i had to trash because i i messed up let me show you how i messed it up just it was a misinfor interpretation on how i was supposed to use the bentek software so first of all um i'm gonna make the the driver side uh a-pillar over here so i'm gonna start off by by bending a piece of metal um you know what i gotta go back i'm gonna bend it twice so two bends i'm gonna start over here this thing's a little bit crazy how you move it around but over there i'm gonna to go point right over your head down the uh the a pillar and then down the door here and there is my part it's going to be called part number 11 and there's what it's going to look like once i bend the part i'm going to go ahead and i've got these two ends over here which are going to need to be fished mouth to the end of the tube so i'll go ahead and go to cutting i'm going to start a new cut and again if you're at this point and you've done uh ben tech before then you know how to cut and all those kind of things and if you don't know how to do that and or if you don't know how to do pick points there are plenty of tutorials um this is maybe just a little bit more uh advanced here but i want to cut that to you right there and i want to cut in relation to those two tubes and i'll complete that one and how it drops the start cut right down there i'm going to make another cut i want to cut this tube and these are the two profiles it's got to cut it up against and complete those and now i can open up those tubes those uh those cuts and look at the the cut profile and this is a piece of paper that i will use i'll go ahead and print that and i'll show you what i'll do once we uh we print those those things out next i need to look at the way that the tube is going to be bent so i'm going to go to the parts list i'm going to make sure i have that tube selected and go to the part detail and that's going to show me um if i go over to part details the bend order now soon it's just going to show the order in which things are bent so i know that i've got to make a mark on the tube that's 22 and 5 8 inches and then once i get to that point in my tube bender which i'll show you here in a moment i need to bend that at 45 degrees you hit play and it shows you bending those tubes but more importantly another trick i'm going to show you here in a second is i've got to rotate the tube four degrees in between the first bend and the second bend just because of the geometry of the tube and i'll show you a cool two tool that i made uh for that first things first though so i got that's the bending i'm gonna do first things first i gotta go over there and cut a piece of tubing that is 77 and 1 8 inches long so let's get that first so let me sing the praises of the band saw one more time there is just no other tool that i have that one makes it easier for me to accurately measure things that i'm going to cut and then two just the longevity of the blade i have made this entire car so far and i'm still on one blade it doesn't heat the metal up it just does an awesome job of cutting and so these are more expensive than some of the other saws that i have i think it's about you know it's probably a thousand dollars for a band saw like this but when you look at the other saws i have and the number of blades i've gone through it just makes this one make so much more sense all right step two is marking the tube that i just cut for where i want to bend it and i'm going to show you what i do i just put a very few marks in there but i also write the dimensions on there so that i can see them while they're in the bender i'll show you how i do that so by putting the mark in this orientation when it's in my bender i'll be able to see that number to verify that i'm making the bend in the right place so this is my ender 3 3d printer printing out a tool i just designed infusion 360 and now i'm printing it out takes about probably 10 hours for this one to uh to print out but just from idea to making your print don't have to go buy it from anybody and probably cost me about 50 cents in filament to uh to print out such an awesome tool check out my first tool tips if you're interested in enter three i'll also put a link for it in my description below so now i have that same piece of metal with the markings in my jd square what is it a model 32 two bender and it's ready to bend i have one of my levelers here i took a tube again uh as you saw before it's super important that the tube going in is level in relation to your your bending die and those are exactly on uh together and now i want to be able to measure the rotation here's something i just came up with um i have a couple of these straight edges this is probably some cheap piece of aluminum that i got from uh home depot or something like that but it's an aluminum 90 or piece of angle iron and when i put that down on the tube that makes sure that whatever line i draw follows exactly longitudinally along the the tube i'm just going to pick a line as close as i can get it doesn't really have to be exact to the top of the tube and mark it with my uh my sharpies once i have that line on there now i'm going to go ahead and line up my angle cube now this is something that i don't think existed um i needed something that would hold my angle cube and if you see here there's a little nick mark in there where i index i have it so i can index it the angle cube 90 degrees out from whatever mark i put on the the tube i made this with my 3d printer um and if you go back and check i think it's epis it's the first tool tips if you go back and check that out you can see um how i put my 3d printer to work is one of the best tools i have in my garage this is a two-way circle it's got a little cut out there so we can i can sleeve over the top of this tube and then now i'm going to do is i'm going to go ahead and index it right that little notch right that line i just drew i'm going to turn the angle cube on i'm gonna tell it right now you're at zero and then now i know as i feed that tube in and on the second bend i need to turn it four degrees so i'll just make sure it's on that line again because it could it could spin or something like that i'll rotate the two four degrees the angle cable tell me within a hundredth of how close i am to that four degrees i can make the next bend let's get to the bending so before i bend i'm gonna go back to my chart here this is for my two inch tubes a six and a half uh radius two bender that i i have in the jd squared right now uh these are all the bends i've done the results as far as this is where i try to bend it to these are the results to give me the spring back the last bins i just did are the exact same bends i was shooting for 45 degrees i bent it to 49 degrees planning on four degrees of spring back and sure enough i hit it within 0.2 degrees that's pretty good in my book there the next one i've been 39 degrees i get i plan on three and a half degrees of spring back and again i miss it by 0.2 degrees i'm gonna do the same thing i'm gonna go ahead and bend this next to exactly the same let's get on the bender [Music] [Music] so here is one of those learn from my mistake moments um i made the assumption when i bent one of these and now it's in that graveyard of bent tubes in my workshop back there i made the assumption that the uh the the top of the tube where it was bending was also the reference line that you line up the sleeves with that you're going to help you cut the fish mouths so on these on these sheets of paper that you're going to cut out in a second here they have these reference lines and you got to line it up on something and here's what you got to do is if you've got a bend and a cut on the same piece of metal is wherever you're going to cut the closest bend that cut is what it's going to reference off off of so i have clamped this piece down so this bend is down against the the table so now i know that um what it has to what you do is you take the line off the the apex of that bend the furthest part out of that bend and you uh you draw it across the other front of the tube so what i did is since that part is all the way down and it's clamped down there i know it's it's the same distance over here i have a piece of wood that's half of the thickness of the tube so it's one inch two inch tube one inch thickness piece of wood i put that up against the uh my tube now and with a nice sharp pencil i'm gonna go ahead and mark that and that will be where i put the paper sleeve once i make that and that's where i'm gonna line up that reference line at this point just like the straight tubes now you're just putting those paper sleeves on the the tube just remember this time you're not referencing you're not measuring from the distance from each of the the pieces of paper you're referencing the distance from the end of the tube you cut and that's why it's so important that you cut that tube accurately to the correct length because in this case it might be two to an eighth inch that i'm going from the end of the tube that closest end to it and that will also make it different the way you cut this piece of paper because now i'm actually going to cut it right on that radial reference line before we get to cutting let's let's just talk really quickly about safety well i'm going to be using an angle grinder it's going to have one of these high speed discs on here four and a half inch discs things will be flying and if you haven't seen videos of people with these things coming apart they stick in the skin they take eyeballs out and those kinds of things so you really got to be careful with that first i'll just make sure i have a new blade or the blade looks good don't don't wear it all the way down to a nub uh while you're cutting that thing and then as far as protecting the the face i'm going to use double eye protection so i will use my regular eye protection which if you're somewhere and this uh this shield also uh it gives off a lot of fine powder dust and i wear a respirator just so i don't get the black lung i usually wear like cheap gloves when i'm handling the metal to just keep the oils that kind of stuff off my skin but when i'm angle grinding it's got a good leather gloves that won't be penetrated by a spinning disc that shatters or something like that um to clean it up i'll go ahead and go over it with an angle grinder and i use a flat disc and you know i kind of like as opposed to a new flat disc i like the old ones uh just because they're radius and it actually helps you get in there and make those radius carbs that you're going to do let me show you how i do that with both starting with the angle grinder first and then hitting it with the the flap disc i use two angle grinders because i go back and forth so many times i don't like to you know swap discs and those kinds of things and i'll put a link to these in my description below so here's the last part of that aim small mist small you got to get your cuts as close as you can to that black line that you drew and since you drew it on the outside of the paper i try to cut all of the black off and what i'll do is i'll start with that angle grinder i'll start it and then i'll walk it into that line and make the cut and then you can't get the whole cut a lot of the times there's a piece that's hanging off you can't get the angle grinder in there but if you just get a pair of pliers you as long as it's a small like within about a quarter of an inch you just get in there and rip the piece off and then it'll rip off pretty cleanly after you rip that off then go ahead now you can grab your other angle grinder that has the flap disc on it and now you can start carving in there and again if it's slightly radiused it makes it easy to kind of follow the contours of uh of this tube that you're cutting and you get pretty close literally within about a width of the hair you'll see just going to barely shave off the black line and then when you put the tube on the chassis it's going to be a perfect fit well the angle grinder and all that just makes a mess of your garage this is probably one of my tool tips later on one of these magnetic brooms i'll put it again in my description below such a cool tool it does such a really good job of cleaning up all the fine small pieces of metal there is that tube placed into position you can see the the gaps look pretty good i'm pretty sure that my uh six-year-old could do that well it's been pretty nice uh all the way around you know all the tubes that are here i did uh basically using that same procedure just cutting the piece of paper putting it on there probably just did it about 100 times though so i got a little bit better at it as i went through you can kind of see how my technique was uh there hopefully that helps all right check it out here it is the uh the j10 still missing a little bit of the back end here but it's getting pretty darn close and you can see just with that bend tech software man i'm able to create some really super complicated nodes uh which i just don't know how else you would do that i don't know how else people can get those uh to work with and really all i'm doing is i put in the bentek software i make the cut and literally the pieces almost snap together uh as i make this thing you can kind of see uh all the parts just kind of come together nicely and the more confident the more accurate that i got with the uh the software and cutting the tubes the better they went together i was literally not having to do much trimming at all you can see that uh you know sometimes i got well just a little bit of a gap here for but for the most part you know it's going to be really easy gaps to uh to fill in there and do the uh this is the tape welding which you can already see that i've started on so that's anyway so i've got a lot of welding to do for those of you that are keeping up with the uh the truck build let me guys i'm going to give you a quick update of all the stuff i've got going on uh for this build so you see the trailing arms there that was what i cut on that uh indexing video the third langmeyer systems uh video we got the the rear axle we are going to be doing a video and i want to do a five minute video showing how we swapped out the yukon locker into this uh 14 volt axle and how it's just super easy to uh to do just some a really quick reference i'll video i'll do for that let's go ahead and take a look over here at the uh the front of the truck which i did a whole bunch of videos on how to cut the top and the lower a-arms how i did that and also how i made this steering system i don't know if anyone else has ever done a steering system like this before where i'm using the stock gm steering box out of the 2010 chevy silverado 2500 hd and basically making it push that slider and the steering works awesome i've got great steering out of this thing it looks like let's say the front suspension is going to give me about 20 to 22 inches of travel i'll have about 30 inches of travel in the uh the rear suspension you can see i've been working on these upper shock mounts a whole bunch of parts just totally cranking it out if you haven't been paying attention i got about 40 days from now to have this truck ready for the the baja 1000 so there's still a lot of fabrication i got to do a lot of work a lot of the work is done you know most of the wiring on the engine is done it's ready to drop in i just put the shifter on it and it's looking pretty good uh it's working well the fuel system i got all the parts i've got all the parts for the brake uh system in and the cooling we'll be getting that here uh soon so now it's just kind of coming together with some of the smaller parts but the big question marks you know how this thing is going to go together is solved and i think uh you know now i'm feeling pretty good as we uh we start getting towards the end of this build well usually in these videos i say i don't get anything for promoting some of the things i'm using on the videos but in this case the guys at ben tech saw my video and sent me a t-shirt and a couple stickers i just want to say thank you to those guys especially for making such an amazing product that i've been using to build a j-10 race truck well i recently saw in one of the forums somebody was asking what is the best tube notcher i can get for my shop and i after using bendtech software i would say forget the tube notcher get yourself the software and go find an angle grinder actually get two i would get two non-battery angle grinders one you can have a flat disc on all the time and one you can have a cutting wheel on all the time i have the jd square beast which i think is probably the best tube notch that you can get out there however i find i use it mostly as a vise or as an anvil sometimes because the thing is so big but just now after using the software i just don't see any reason to have a tube notcher anymore well thank you so much for joining us we've got 40 days left we're still trying to crush it get this truck ready for the uh the baja 1000. they just released the course and we're super excited it looks like about 830 miles i think for the uh the sportsman classes which we're going to be racing in this year still got to get a lot of parts we're heading up to car tech tomorrow nice to have a specialty shop like that uh nearby and they're truly i think the best is as far as providing race products for uh for guys like me out there and super easy to deal with with that thank you again for uh joining us please don't forget to hit the like and subscribe button and we'll see on the next episode take care of yourself you

Channel: NTD Racing

Views: 13,286

Keywords: bend-tech pro, Bend-Tech, Dewalt, Baja 1000, Score International, Jeep, J10, CJ7, bend-tech pro tube bending software, bend-tech pro review, bend-tech pro tutorial, bend tech pro roll cage, bend-tech pro tube bending sofware, bend-tech pro reveiw, score, baja, San filipe, bend-tech tutorial

Id: ZlmLKxpqrgs

Length: 30min 23sec (1823 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 21 2020