Lord of the Rings

Previously I have discussed the problems I have had in rolling the rings that will become the rims of the road wheels and return rollers. So I decided to make my own ring roller. To be perfectly honest, I had no idea if my fabrication skills would up to the challenge. To be effective, the rollers don't need to be perfect, but a close approximation there of. This is complicated somewhat by my desire to do this with as little cash outlay as possible. Yeah I can be real cheap at inopportune times.

My idea was pretty simple; take the basic tube bender design and modify it for flatbar and the rollers to be compressed from the bottom instead of the top. The rollers are a section of schedule 80 2" pipe with a piece of 1" road bar through the middle and 1" washers on the ends. The hard part was getting everything lined up and centered when they were welded together. I used some blocks of wood and drilled appropriate sized holes to help center everything up.

I thought about using bushings to keep the rollers in place, but I have a number of pillow block bearings sitting around. The bearings will be used in the final drive for the Brummbär; however, I'm sure they will not mind being put to work a little early.

Everything went together fairly easy. No big surprises. All of the rollers center axis seems to be parallel (important) but a couple of them were off center by about 1/64". Not too bad for a rookie and quite usable. Normally a slip roller has two rollers that turn (feeding the material) and the third is used to adjust the distance between all three. I did the opposite. Only one roller feeds the material (top roller) and the other two (bottom rollers) move up and down to adjust the distance between the rollers. One of the concerns with this approach is that one feed roller may not have enough "grab" to feed the material through the three rollers. However, this was not an issue as there was very little or no slippage.

Everything worked well. I was able to use this to fix (mostly) the rings the Harbor Freight ring roller twisted in the Z axis. There was an issue with flat spots on the ends of the ring, but a few love taps with a small sledge took care of that with little fuss. All of the rings for the road wheel rims are rolled. I still need to cut and roll the rings for the return rollers. That will be for another day though....