How To Bend Acrylic Pipe PERFECTLY - Marble Machine X#79

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]

[Music]

[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]