Project 1 by redbeard : Hydrualic Shop Press

[everlastsupport]

Thanks Mike. I have http://www.harborfreight.com/20-ton-...ess-32879.html and it's pretty darn stable, a bit of a pain to adjust, but plenty of holes in it...

I'd seen some other brakes, just always on the lookout for other designs. You can find them on google, but it's rare you can see them and then ask questions about 'why did this go this way'

Scooter bought that one I think and welded it up just to make it stronger. I almost went that way, but the cheap in me and free metal. Took a couple months but we did it.

If you have cash, there is a swagoffroad.com something like that, they have it all CNC made brake, and you weld it together. It is nice, but some fair size angle iron, piece of plate and you can get by.

Scooter and Chadrock gave all the metal sizes, or close enough Chad could copy Frank's version. I can take pic and measure when he used if you need and PM or email to you.

[redbeard]

Sorry I just came back to this thread to look up that handy chart and noticed that I was remiss in responding, I hadn't yet discovered the subscription function when I first posted I guess.

Anyway, I wound up doing a couple different setups for the different sizes I've done so far. The latest one for longer stock looks like this:




I just used a couple pieces of stout angle clamped to the channel with spacers for the bottom, and a piece of T-post with the center nubbin ground off as the top die. It held up well for the 4" bends, but it did bend a bit when I went for 8".
Although I didn't notice any signs of bending, if I was going for anything bigger, I would probably take the precaution of running a piece of allthread through the table to keep the channel from splaying.



This is a recreation of the original setup I used for the shorter brackets, a bit simpler just using the plates with spacers on the sides (not the one in the picture obviously) to fill in the space to the legs. If I remember correctly, I used pipe clamps to hold the legs together just for safety's sake.