Making your own dies

[dikman]

First bending bit, this was whipped up to see if I could actually bend anything in this contraption. As you can see it sort of works. Being angle iron the inside is radiused so I cant get a right angle bend, I'll have to file it to square up the inside. I also need to reinforce the underside where the 1/2" rod goes through to make sure it stays upright against the pushing force. Now to make more jig/tools of various shapes, I need one that is like a knife edge so I can get sharp bends, this may need to be made from something that can be hardened.

One problem, which I half expected, is that pushing down on the handle causes the other end to rise so the whole thing needs to be clamped down