Bending small copper tube

GW1 - Your wife may not appreciate your efforts but, I do! As de facto 'cook' for self and partner, my constantly less effective grip makes 'normal' round centrally placed knobs increasingly difficult to grasp. Your 'repair' as a properly incorporated design would make life much easier!

Patent Office, anyone?

rgds

Bill

Cheers Bill

It's nice to be appreciated!!

Geoff

What I love about engineering in general is that there is always more than one way of doing things so here a a couple of alternatives -

Don't bother bending the pipe. Keep it straight and use elbows and tee's when you want to turn a corner. These are available as castings or ready made items. Or you could machine/fabricate your own from bar stock.

When using thin walled tube (particularly brass) it has a tendency to collapse if bent through a tight radius. Anneal the pipe, let it cool, then pack it with something that will bend but won't let the pipe collapse. One approach is to plug one end of the pipe, fill it with table salt and plug the other end. The advantage with this method is the salt is easy to remove once the bending is done. However, depending on the internal diameter of the pipe or tube this procedure gets progressively more fiddly as the diameter gets smaller.

For (really) small diameter tube insert a styrene rod that is a close sliding fit. Bend the tube into whatever shape takes your fancy. Remove the styrene rod by burning it out with a blowtorch.