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