If you’re in the business of, say, fabricated steel ornamental railings or, perhaps, automobile exhaust system production, we have the perfect machine tools for you. Collectively they are called tube and pipe tools, separately they are broken down into tube and pipe benders and tube and pipe notchers, and these machines do these types of jobs exceptionally well.
What if you own a large construction company and you win a bid to build the new sports stadium in town? There could well be thousands of feet of hand rail and posts to produce and install. What if you want to open the most productive general fabrication shop that can take whatever kind of business comes in the door? You could not do without the capability of even the smallest tube and pipe bender currently on the market. (We think we’ve made our point.)
The modern tube and pipe tools of today epitomize the adage about getting “the most bang for the buck.” For machines that cost in the thousands rather than the tens of thousands, what they are capable of producing is nothing short of astounding. We mentioned the “smallest tube and pipe bender on the market” — while such a machine is typically described as a “bench top model,” it also happens to be portable. That small machine, when equipped with the proper set of dies, can bend every size tube and pipe from ¼” to 1¼” capacity. Bolt that same bender to the back of a work truck and you have that capacity right on the jobsite. (Okay, so that’s a good case for the small guys, wait until you see what the bigger boys can do!)
If you look around the industry today you will find a fairly high level of sophistication in the medium to larger sized tube and pipe benders and notchers. (We mostly sell benders, so that will be our focus here.) The 3-axis semi-automatic NC-controlled machines can produce a finished bent tube or pipe with as many as 10 bends in the bending sequence, and do so without requiring additional operator input. If, by chance, your piece part is an automobile exhaust pipe and you have 13 bends, you can automatically go into the next program slot on the controller and continue bending up to another 10 bends if necessary. Fully-automatic mandrel retraction is also a built-in feature of most newer tube and pipe benders.
These same machines are extremely good at one-off production because they are easy to program and quick to set-up. If you run an automobile exhaust repair shop and bought one of these machines, the only exhaust pipe you would have to stock is a bunch of straight tubes. Gone are the days of all the racks to the ceiling of pre-made exhaust pipe; slap a straight stick on the bender and make whatever you need in a matter of minutes. Usually these NC-controlled machines will provide something like 100 slots of held memory positions available to the operator for reoccurring jobs.
The tube and pipe benders we represent are market leaders in their respective machine categories. Gone is any machine — even the smallest — that utilized the old and outdated “ram style” designs. All our machines are either the “rotary draw” configuration, the top-bending rotary draw configuration, or the top bend design; none utilize the old design. Bud's Machine Tools offers in excess of a dozen models that run the size range from 1/4" capacity to 4" capacity. The controls on our tube and pipe bender line-up run the gamut from manual to semi-automatic to NC controls to the head-of-the-class CNC mandrel bending operation.
The bigger-sized machines (meaning those of a greater capacity) are of a lay-down horizontal layout design where there is a feed table section with the bending device at one end. These machines can be had in table lengths of 5', 10', and even 20'. Typical everyday capacities of up to 4¾" are fairly common but these machines are also available in capacities of 5", 6.5", and a hearty 10". (The 10" capacity machine is often, for good reason, called the “Giga-Bender.”)
When a company needs a new machine (or a “new” used machine for that matter), who they pick to supply them with that piece of equipment is of paramount importance. The reason being is that the sales organization becomes, in a way, a part of the organization that is buying the equipment. “How so?” you might ask. There is a single-word answer to that question and that word is support.
Companies today run lean and mean and that means they rely on their suppliers to maintain their production equipment in a timely manner. Bud's Machine Tools is building its reputation in the industry by doing the same thing time and again in the areas of sales, service and support, not only meeting our customers’ expectations but exceeding them.
We use cookies to improve your experience. Privacy Policy.
