ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area Bending conduit

Yeah that's what I did I went out purchased a bender for 1/2 EMT and some 1/2 EMT conduit. We had a demonstration on it in class I didn't do to well because I had like 25 guys watching me and it made me very nervous. The third year students were laughing at me, but I played sports so I'm use to criticism lol. I'm going to be the best damn conduit bender they ever saw hehe.

I really like this one: ELECTRICIAN'S GUIDE TO CONDUIT BENDING by Richard A. Cox. He goes into great detail about the math involved in laying out accurate conduit bends. It may be TOO thorough for some people, but at the same time it is a great reference source and you can take it as far as you want to go. Jack Benfield's book and formulas are great too, but Cox shows you where those formulas come from in trigonometry. There are some great methods for pre-determining offset placement, laying out for bending 2 45's around an obstruction when a 90 won't fit, etc. Also laying out concentric and segment bends. The best way to make these techniques work is thru practice, with different types and sizes of benders, hand benders, ratcheting, electric---and also, bending rigid and having to thread it all together is another whole ball game.

THE ELECTRICIAN'S GUIDE TO CODUIT BENDING by Richard A. Cox

The tapes are expensive, but you can find them (and the various manuals) here

[This message has been edited by DougW (edited 02-12-2005).]

I usually suck at pipe bending but I just bent up about 100' of 1/2" EMT for lights around my pool cage,including stub ups, saddles, offsets and some twisties that don't really have a name (forming the pipe to the screen frame).
I used the tables on the Porcupine site Smokum posted up thread a ways and it really worked out pretty well.
Now I know what all those marks on the hickey are for anyway. The only thing I wish was that they had stripes on the EMT so you could line up bends along the pipe. I did have one that had a bunch of small bends to go around some stuff but somehow I got about 10 degrees off about half way down. I just cut it and put in a coupler so I could twist the pipe.
The wife was happy so I guess it worked