Frame Game

It’s time to finally get the RC374 on its wheels…

- Allen Milly

I rarely do any drawings or sketches when I make my bikes because I like to create parts from an image in my mind, but there are occasions when a drawing is unavoidable.

I had recently ordered a length of 28mm T45 chrome manganese steel tube to see if it was possible to bend it at home with my old pipe bender. There is a difference between pipe and tube – pipe is measured by its internal diameter and tube is measured by its outside diameter, so the dies on my pipe bender didn’t match exactly with the diameter of the tube.

I remembered an old trick where you pack the tube with sand and weld discs onto each end to help support the tube wall while it’s being bent. I was quite surprised how hard the T45 tube was to bend and even with the sand packed inside it would bend a bit and then start to ripple on the inner curve.

“I’ve met my match,”I thought to myself, the main frame rails would need to be bent by a specialist firm. I contacted Tom at Tube-bender Ltd (07583 682814), who said that would be no problem, I was to send him a drawing and they would create a CNC program to bend the two frame rails on their CNC tube bender.