How to bend acrylic pipe perfectly.
Step 1: Measure the inner diameter of your pipe -
18 millimeter and outside is 22 millimeter.
Step 2: Get a silicon rod that fits on the inside of your pipe.
Mine is a medical silicone rod and it's exactly 18 mm.
Step 3: Cut your silicon rod to length and then
cut a taper at one side.
Drill a hole through the table side.
Step 4: Use a really strong string and thread it through that hole you just drilled in the silicon rod.
I have noticed that bending a thin metal wire and using that as a kind of a needle really helps with this.
Step 5: Here I'm putting some corn flour starch on the silicon rod to make it slide easier.
You can also try washing up liquid or soapy water.
And that's all the preparation done.
so we can finally thread our silicon rod through the acrylic pipe.
Put on some gloves and start up your heat gun.
Step 6: Bending the acrylic pipe. Try to heat up the acrylic pipe as evenly as you can.
You can adjust the temperature by moving the silicon rod closer or further away from
the heat gun and in my experience the further away you are and the more
patience you spend and the slower you do this step the better the result.
Once you feel that critics often hang up you can do your bend.
I like to try to stay in the heat of the heat gun but a little bit further away.
Constantly keeping the acrylic warm while I'm doing the bend
and then removing the acrylic from the heat gun when I'm happy with the shape.
so this was my first try and it's not perfect
You can see here I let the heat go a little bit too far so we have these
ugly bubbles and the whole pipe is a little cloudy.
I think it was because my gloves were really oily so I was a stupid choice of gloves.
The corn flour starch normally doesn't cloud my pipes
But for the second try I wanted to use washing up liquid and clean gloves instead.
Let's see how that went for the second try/
I went with a really tight radius as you can see here.
I think I got greedy and went with a little bit too tight radius.
The pipe looks clear though.
No more cloudiness and I would recommend you to order more material than what you need for your
project because you will have some failed pipe.
Practice makes perfect as always.
Okay! Third time's the charm.
Whoever said that perfection does not exist and that it's a fool's errand to pursue it did not look at
my son nail picture in 4k resolution.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this tutorial.
It's a true pleasure to bend acrylic pipes and now you have to make up a project just
to be able to experience it.
The reason why I'm bending so much acrylic pipe right now is because of the Marble Machine X
Here I'm using bent acrylic pipe for marble transportation connecting the
demagnetizer with the marble conveyor belt and higher up on a machine have
connected the outlet from the conveyor belt and the fish star with a marble divider and also
the marble divider itself is made from bent PMMA pipe.
I have just started to work on the most difficult acrylic pipe bending project of the whole Marble Machine X filled
I need to connect the marble spreader that I built in plywood with these metal rails and
all the pipes want to collide with each other.
I need to find perfect routing for this to work here.
I'm working on channel 22 which is the last channel of the vibraphone and there's a total of 38 channels.
Since we need to make 38 individual pipes.
And I'm using a TIG filler rod to create a bend template to get a feel for what kind of geometry I need a pipe to be
then I can use this plan template to create a general shape for the pipe.
oh oh oh. Hold on! what's this beauty!
If you remember, I found this stud welding CNC machine that I thought was amazing and I reached out
to them and asked if they wanted to collaborate and then something truly beautiful happen.
Because you the viewer started to leave comments to HPS explaining why they should collab with
me on the Marble Machine X.
My favorite was that they should lift up an artist from the sunken cost vortex.
I went back to send an email to HPS and when I opened my email I found an email from HBS
Tthat's thanks to all your comments.
Thank you so much for sticking up for the Marble Machine X and
thanks to HBS for being positive towards the project.
I send some requirements and they sent me this test piece and I just want to show you
how extremely precise this is. Here I'm using a micrometer which is measuring in millimeter.
When you hear the first click of the clutch of the micrometer that's when you should read your value
18. I'm actually measuring quite crooked.
So if I had a place to measure more straight we would get even better result.
This machine is down to thousands of a millimeter in precision.
It's just so promising.
[Music]
We're looking at using my manual programming pin system that I already
built for me when I'm composing music for the Marble Machine X and then using
this more sturdy, reliable, pre-programmed, precise studwelding programming pin system from
HBS for the world tour.
So we can have the best out of two worlds.
There. I'm completely side-tracked in this video.
Now I'm just so happy about this prospect.
Let's go back to some PMMA pipe bending. Shall we?
I'm using the template and creating the general shape and here I'm making a little mark so I can cut it to length.
And then I can open the marble spreader and see if the pipe fits and this first.
Pipe actually fits perfectly you can see.
The marble is coming out there the first type is easiest.
The consecutive pipes are going to be much more difficult
Because they have the problem of colliding with each other.
This is the moment where I realized I made three pipes and I have 35 pipes to go.
[Music]
[Applause]
In situations like this where I need to do really repetitive work which happens a lot
on a Marble Machine X due to its 38 channels. I keep myself going by repeating an inner mantra.
It goes like this: "world tour world tour world tour"
But seriously I totally underestimated how time-consuming it was to make these pipes.
So over eight hours later I had managed to do 11 out of 38 pipes and had to call it a day.
I will return to finish this task as soon as possible, but for now I could just check the pipes I made.
And they seem to work well.
[Music]
At this moment I felt like a vampire.
It was like two marbles showed me the way out of my studio and into the Sun.
I spent a little time inside my Studios.
I was so happy strolling around with the camera
This is my apricot tree I found
the first effort of the other day you
see it there as an applicant there's a
huge growth here on the front of the
house
[Music]
I have my absolute here under the rose
he's having a good time there it's like
virginal just smelling the flowers BBC
parents are got nothing on me okay so
thank you so much for watching and
believing in the model
[Music]