Pipe-Bending Techniques

Video Transcript

"I'm Jeremiah Fox. I'm a carpenter and handyman out here in New York City. So, let's talk about pipe bending techniques. For the most part, unless you're doing some decorative work for like a coat rack or something, the pipe you're going to be bending in home modeling and repair is thin pipe called conduit. Conduit comes in several sizes, it's primarily for electrical uses, you run your wires through this, it runs through walls and keeps it all safe. Now, to bend the pipe, you're going to need your conduit, you're going to need marking tool and then you're going to need the pipe bender, which is this handy little tool here which can bend your pipe to any number of angles. Now the pipe bender is already labeled and set up to make things easy, where you put one end of your pipe in here and then to whatever angle you want to bend it to. You can bend it 10 degrees, 20 degrees, 30 degrees, 45, 60 and then, if you come all the way around here, you give yourself a nice right angle at 90 degrees. So the most common angle that you're going to use when bending pipe is a 90 degree, right angle bend. So, in order to do that, take your pipe, measure out where you needed the bend to start, mark it with a Sharpie, then take your pipe bender, slide the end that you want to stay flat into the hooked end of the bender, lining up your Sharpie mark with this little arrow here. Now, pipe bending is all about leverage so it'll really be helpful if you take your pipe and have it on the floor, put your foot on the pipe past where the bend is going to go, then basically, just keep pushing and pulling and rocking all the way over until it stops. Now, if you go less than that, you can take it to any of these other degrees, but for the 90 degree you want to go all the way until it hits this piece of metal here. Once you've finished the bend, just give it a little pop release, twist it out, and then you've got a nice 90 degree angle on your pipe to fit all those corners and nooks in your house. So, while you can bend your own conduit and put them in the walls, I highly recommend using a licensed professional electrician for the actual wiring of the house to make sure everything's safe and up to code."