Oh hey there.  As part of the theater show I’m working on I’ve been making these industrial gooseneck type things for the bar lighting.  As you can see, a big part of it is the loop of conduit that goes up and around to support the fixture.  I figured, no problem, I’ll just get a conduit bender from Home Despot and bend it to suit.

So that was a disaster.  I could get bends up to 90 degrees just fine, but after that the bender would start to slip on the conduit and I would get squircles rather than a continuous loop like I wanted.   My results could be summarized thusly:

As I am nothing if not persistent, I went to the idea store and came up with this:

There’s a circle cut from MDF on the inside radius of the conduit.  As the handle is turned, it pulls the conduit in, and it’s forced to bend around the circle.  I had to ask a dancer stand on it while I was bending it to get enough torque (thanks, Cici!) and it has a tendency to pulverize the MDF at the working surfaces, but heyo it works!

Here’s a sneak peek work-in-progress picture of the fixtures I’m building:

I am aiming to be America’s #1 blog on improvised conduit bending machines, so more on this topic soon!