Magnum Bender
The Magnum Bender is the brain child of design engineer Paul Prince. The story starts about 15 years ago when Paul set up a manufacturing company - Aviation Metalcraft - to produce components for homebuilt and historic/vintage aircraft. Every aircraft has a high proportion of metalwork in its construction. Without proper facilities, creating the many parts is difficult to say the least. Perhaps one of the most frequently encountered tasks is precision bending/forming of small detailed fabrications.
The designers background included the design and manufacture of ultra-high precision machine tools at Cranfield Institute of Technology, injection mould and press tool design. It was therefore relatively straightforward to produce the necessary press tooling to form parts.
By 2001, Aviation Metalcraft was the largest supplier of specialist metalwork to the homebuilt aircraft movement in Europe. With more and more metalwork kits being added to the product rangea quicker and lower cost method of production was needed - a "system" that reduced the need for component specific dedicated tooling.
The Magnum Bender is the outcome. An almost "universal" bender (I dislike the term "universal" applied to machines; no single machine is ever truly "universal"). The beauty of the Bender is the ability to produce precision bends of different radii and to locate parts accurately with respect to the bend line. The Universal Tooling Plate with its rare earth magnets to hold work in place is seen by many as an outstanding design feature.The Universal Tooling Plate is in effect a machine tool, table-like feature applied for the first time to a precision bender.
To roll the Magnum Bender out to a wider customer base, a manufacturing partner was sought. Warco, a family run company, specializing in the supply of machine tools was approached. The result is that Warco now manufactures the Magnum Bender under Licence. Warco also distribute the Magnum Bender worldwide.
Follow the links below to the distributor websites:>
<>Warco
in UK & Worldwide
Aircraft
Spruce and Speciality in USA
LAS Aerospace in UK and Europe
