Harbor Freight Tubing Roller

[jamscal]

I've had one of these for a while now. Haven't used it much, but did test it out.

A guy over on Pirate4x4 is selling 1.75" dies along with a better shaft/screws.

There are a few cool pics of what people are doing with them over there.

-James

[Reed]

Now you tell us!! On your "value judgement" of this tool I went early to HF today and purchased it with the square die set. Just kidding. Anyone that thinks this this unit could make such small circles has limited knowledge of these tools. I'm just opening mine and setting it up. If the dies are any good at all it should be worth the price.

Making a roller die is a real task for anyone even with decent equipment.

Just takes a lathe and a radius cutter. I made hubs and separate dies that bolt to the hub. For additional dies, I just make the die and never mess with the bearing part as that is in the hub.

In the pic, the bolt holes are not drilled yet, but you can see each roller die has a 5/8" and 7/8" cut for 1/2" and 3/4" tubing on each die. The larger dies I made only fit one tubing size.

- Reed

[monte55]

Those look very nice. I'll give you $12.72 for the lot. OK?
Nick

[Reed]

Those look very nice. I'll give you $12.72 for the lot. OK?
Nick

That might be a smidgen below my lowest number. :-)

- Reed

[Portable Welder]

I went to harbor freight for a oil can thinking how bad could they screw that up and came across the Roller and thoght Wow what a deal.

When I measured the Dies I was disapointed to find out that they are not sized for pipe.

[Reed]

Well in this case they did not screw it up. They called it a "Tubing" roller and that is what it is.

If I get a job that needs large radius "pipe" bends, I might make some dies for it, but I'll expect a workout using it. This design is not a high load kinda' thing either. hummm, it may slip also. Given it has 2" dia. dies, maybe 1 or 1.5" pipe might work. . . .

Back to Lurking.

- Reed

[aametalmaster]

I don't have an HF roller but i do have a larger slip roll. I run 66" long pcs of small sq tubing all the time and i just had to motorize the thing. That thing is a killer with 100-500 parts. Most of my tubing gets run thru 4 or 5 times to keep it from twisting or curving as i need it perfect. So that becomes a 500 pc run. So keep your eyes open for a 60:1 Boston gearbox and an electric motor to keep everything simple. All push button from there...Bob

[FusionKing]

This is something I have needed to be able to do. I am too cheap to spend $2000+, if I can figure out a way to make a $159 tool do the job with some elbow grease and a little cash here and there.
The main challenge to this was getting out ALL THE FREEKING SLOP!!!!
As you can see I added shims to the sides of the rollers and even had to add them on the sides of the upper yoke and the outside of the yoke pin. About $15 worth of the little bugars. I would imagine it would have done fine on round tube but oval-edgeways creates a lot of tendency to shift to one side.
I would never have believed this die set would have done this job. I would have bet MONEY that the sides would have bulged out...they didn't even a little bit as far as the eye can tell. I didn't mike it tho.
You can see that it does score aluminum some but some of that washes off and all of it will sand, which is fine for powder coating.
BTW the stand is a DELTA..you can even see the box in the background.

[Sonora Iron]

Did you have trouble with the wheel slipping on the shaft? I couldn’t get the setscrews to hold it in place, so I welded it! I have a flatbar roller in the same price rage that has the wheel and shaft keyed, with two setscrews, would have been nice if these things were keyed also.

[FusionKing]

Well truth is I remembered your post about that and so I was very careful to keep retightening all the screws.
That part of this is a joke. The set screws on the dies work loose as well.
I was thinking I'll probably do something like drill it and the dies out and step up to a bigger American size.
As I suspected...you can do very nice work with this machine but you must be very careful.
If the Delrin I ordered ever gets here I want to play with making some dies.