Buying prefab bends or bending them?

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JJWalecka

JJWalecka

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New England
What?s more cost effective?

Buying prefab bends, for larger sized EMT, or bending them? Perfect situation all material near by and set up hydraulic bender.

I have often wondered this... If you had a competent person bending 4? nineties in bulk would it be cheaper than buying em? How many could be bent in an hour three?five??

I am curious what everyone?s take is. Thank you for your time.

JJ
 
It really depends on the amount of pipe work you do if buying a Bender is justifiable.

A Greenlee full electric Smart bender that can handle 1/2" to 2" in EMT, RMC and IMC is about $6000 or $7000.

To go bigger sizes your defiantly into Hydraulic units that will run as much or more.
 
I buy them also. About a month ago I really could have used eight 2'' 22?'s. None of my suppliers had them. Thats when a hydro would have been handy.
 
Pipe bending is kind-of a lost art. I recently inspected a parking garage with many, many bends around structural beams, columns, whatever. It was a really nice looking job.

For jobs like that, pre-fabbed would have been both cost prohibitive and ugly. For your run if the mill installations, they are probably a good solution, without the unnessary labor.
 
This is one of those issues where making artwork can sometimes cloud clear thinking. ;) Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for field bending EMT and I agree with Bryan that it's a lost art, but at the end of the day only electricians are going to care that you use factory bends of you field bent it or not.

The bottom line is that you pretty much use what method is faster for the conditions at hand.
 
Buying factory ninetys is usually more cost efficient and we use them but we use the benders for offsets and kicks.
 
What I take into consideration is the number of bends needed. It would be more cost effeicient to by factory bends for a small job than taking the bender to the job site and setting it up. On large jobs the bender pays for itself.

Roger
 
I love to bend pipe both EMT and rigid all sizes. I try my best to make it look close to perfect and be cost effective, if all possible.

I was taught by some great craftsman, I hope I learned a little. LOL.

I was curious if in was efficient to make a bunch of prefab nineties and keep them stored as opposed to buying them. I realize every time you touch material you lose money.

Thank you very much for your feed back

JJ
 
roger said:
What I take into consideration is the number of bends needed. It would be more cost effeicient to by factory bends for a small job than taking the bender to the job site and setting it up. On large jobs the bender pays for itself.

Roger
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Hi Roger,
I agree with what you have said it depends on the size of the job. But what in your opinion would be the cut off point from purchasing the 90's and setting up the bender? For the sake of argument lets say you are working with nothing smaller than 2" up to 4". And there will be little or no offsets.
 
We were wiring machines in a plant a number of years ago and bent ninetys on several 1 1/4" stalks of rmc and I still look at a few of them. Be carefull I'd rather stock complete lengths of conduit than bent ones.
 
JJWalecka said:
I was curious if in was efficient to make a bunch of prefab nineties and keep them stored as opposed to buying them.
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I have done that when the bender I had on my job had to move onto another job and we still had some 2" to run.

We still had a pile of 2" on the job so I bent a bunch of 90s, 45s and 22s. But normally I would I would not want think that is the best way to go.
 
ceb58 said:
Hi Roger,
I agree with what you have said it depends on the size of the job. But what in your opinion would be the cut off point from purchasing the 90's and setting up the bender? For the sake of argument lets say you are working with nothing smaller than 2" up to 4". And there will be little or no offsets.
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Hello Curtis, I'd probably use somewhere around 10 to 12 90's for the cut off of buying them.

Roger
 
roger said:
Hello Curtis, I'd probably use somewhere around 10 to 12 90's for the cut off of buying them.

Roger
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Interesting, I would have thought the number would need to be higher. To justify the man hours for the set up, taking away a person from installing to do the bending and material waste if the person was not real good at bending.
The reason I say this is we have had a large upgrade being done to one of our boiler plants at work. There has been two contract elect. there for almost a year. Don't get me wrong these guys have done some beautiful work ( in the eyes of other electricians) they have done every thing from demo. old work to install new distribution box for our 4800v system, set new xformers, 100kw gen., motor control centers, main dist. panels, all the way to new lighting and recpt. But I have seen them spend days at the bender, pre bending pipe for their runs when they could have purchased the 90's, 45's and 22's and have been running pipe
 
electricalperson said:
we have a hydraulic bender but not a lot of us know how to use it. we buy prefab sweeps anything over 1.25.
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Want to sell it, my company is looking for a used one.
 
It's not an easy question.At risk is the bender itself staying on job site from theft.I get rather uneasy having our $8,000 green lee tuger staying overnight.Unless have many bends i dought its worth it.Now i do see it as something the shop guy could be doing when slow and using scraps.
 
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