[TheForge] Re: helical railing calculations

[Ries Niemi]

Bruce- where you been? obviously not hiding in the back room, reading 
tool catalogs, like me.
I routinely bend flat bar the "hard way". Nowadays, I have an Italian 
made angle roll from eagle bending- see www.eaglebendingmachines.com- 
mine is a CP40.
We just yesterday had a 7 foot long piece of 1/2" x 2" stainless flat 
bar that we had forged a bump texture into one side of. It got kinda 
curvy, so we ran it thru the curvatricci, the hard way, back and forth 
a few times, flipping it in between passes, and the formerly "s" shaped 
bar is now straight and true.
Before I got the curvatricci, I used to do this in the hossfeld bender, 
using the edgebending dies.
see the fifth or so illustration on this page:
www.hossfeldbender.com/BarandAngleIron.htm
The hossfeld will bend up to 1/4" thick flat bar the hard way, cold. 
Heavier than that, hot.
I dont even own a mandrel cone- too expensive and rare, out here.
But I bend flat bar the hard way all the time, and sometimes even for a 
base plate for a handrail- which then gets a wood cap rail screwed on.

ries