Bending Iron

[TomG]

I'm putting the finishing touches on a bending iron I've been working on, so I thought it would be a good time to share.

The iron itself is made from a chunk of aluminum roughly 3" x 5" x 7". A shaper would have been the machine of choice to rough out the airfoil shape, but since I don't have one, multiple passes with a fly cutter got the job done. The finishing was accomplished on the belt sander. There is one 1/4-20 tapped hole in the center for a thermocouple and a couple more for mounting purposes. The cartridge heaters were 12mm in diameter, so I had to wait on a reamer to put the holes in for them. I spaced the iron about 1/4" above the mounting plate on ptfe washers. I'm not sure of the exact operating temperature yet, but they should be good to around 500F. If not, I can always go to a different material. The PID controller and SSR are cheapies off Amazon, but work very well. The whole thing passed the smoke test today and ran up to 250ºF in about three minutes. I suspect it'll need to get up around 400ºF in use, and it doesn't look like that will be a problem. I still have to add a strain relief on the cord and maybe a power switch before buttoning up the enclosure.

Tom