Great idea. Wish you had come up with that when I was dealing with alot of master cylinders.

I like the rollers. That's how the big boys straighten rolls of steel delivered on trucks or trains. Bigger rollers,  but the same idea.

rpm wrote:

I like the rollers. That's how the big boys straighten rolls of steel delivered on trucks or trains. Bigger rollers,  but the same idea.

I used to work in a mill that manufactured electrical conduit and Unistrut. The coils of steel would come in and be placed on the machine, run through a slitter to cut the steel coils into strips of a given width (depending on the diameter of tube being made). The strips would run through a series of forming dies to take the strips of steel from a flat form to a circular form and then would pass through an inline welder to weld the seam together, forming a completed tube. The continuous length of tube would be cut into 8' sections, go through a galvanizing process, stacked, bundled and then was ready for shipment.

The rollers I used for this tubing straightener are SG25 U-groove machine guide rollers (8 x 30 x 14mm with a 10mm U-groove width). They will accommodate 3/16", 1/4", 5/16" and 3/8" diameter tubing, since that's all I ever work with. I didn't see a need for rollers with a wider groove width in them, since I don't have any 1/2" tubing benders and I never use half inch tubing anyway. Plus, SG35 rollers (12mm U-groove width) would have doubled the price over the SG25 rollers for a capability that I would never use.

 

Very nice Steve!

My contribution to "homemade tools" is not a brake tool, but as my lathe/drill/mill combo machine has some limitations I looked into using my larger size Bosch power drill in some kind of drill press stand gizmo. As usual I ended up making my own as the ones available either looked like toys or was very expensive pro stuff. As can be seen I used an old manual center take off rack and pinion, a steering wheel and some other stuff. It actually works better than I expected. Also have to admit that I got the idea from watching how some guys in Russia on YouTube had made the very same thing

I like it! Do you need to rotate the tube as you pull it through?

ultrastang wrote:

It would probably be a handy tool to have around for removing the input rod.

....speaking of fabricated brake tools, I recently did a fuel line plumbing job on a friend's '79 F150 Super cab. We installed a '92 Mustang 5.0L fuel injected engine in his truck. He has dual fuel tanks and I had to run all the plumbing (supply & return) between the tanks, switching valve, filters, fuel pump and to and from the engine.

My buddy had a 25' coil of 5/16" and a 25' coil of 3/8" steel tubing to make the fuel lines from. I had never used coiled steel tubing before, since I've always delt with 60" straight lengths. It was a bit difficult to uncoil the tubing and get them into straight, workable lengths. If the line is curved, bent or warped to start with, it makes it much more difficult to accurately bend the lines to the shape needed for a given run.

I had looked at some tubing straighteners but, they ranged in price from around $150.00 dollars to around $200.00. I decided I would make my own. The only thing I had to purchase was the U-groove bearing rollers. They were under $25.00 for all five.







This is a 60" stick of 3/16" tubing I had gotten from O'Reilly's. It had some bends in it, right off the tubing rack, when I bought it. I put the bent tubing in the straightener and it smoothed the tubing back straight again.

ultrastang wrote:

Thank you, sir. That's a slick setup you made. If you can build something out of essentially scrap components, that will accomplish the task you're trying to do for less than it would cost to buy a tool to do the same thing, then, there's nothing wrong with that.

I don't suppose it matters if you got the basic idea from someone else. I got the idea for making the straightener from pictures of production models I had seen, even though I didn't see a 360° view of them --just the face side. I just reverse engineered how I thought they might be constructed, with a little of my own design thrown in.

I didn't really have a thoroughly mapped out design plan of exactly how I was going to make the straightener. Once I got started on it, I just essentially made things up as I went along in the building of it until it was completed.
 

That's the same approach I usually take. Even if I only understand a few words in Russian I like checking out what's going on in the YouTube videos that has a title in Cyrillic as I know the Russian still do not have the same access to parts like we do in the west and it forces them to create their own stuff with what they have. A lot obviously looks like junk, but here and there you can get some useful ideas from them.