A couple years ago I was watching a guy with a tubing bender perform a few operations on his computerized rig. He stuffed in a 4" diameter piece of tubing, input some commands and then pressed the button. The machine then proceeded to bend the pipe in several different ways. It would advance the pipe a certain pre-calculated distance then begin the bend. At the precise point in the bend it wouls stop and either advance the tube another preset distance or rotate it to continue the bend. A very impressive piece of machinery which would allow precision mandrel bends in just about any size tubing. The most interesting part came when he was done bending the tubing. He took it out of the bender and threw it in a pile of sample pieces he had already bent! I got to thinking and came up with a plan where I could use some of those pieces and asked him if I could have, or buy, several from the pile he had accumulated. He said he really didn't care but I would have to take that up with the guys that came through and took the scrap out to the dumpsters which would then be transferred to trucks to be taken to the scrap yard. He couldn't just give me, or sell to me, any of the pipes that were in the pile. Union rules prevented him from doing that! And he could not throw the pipes directly in the bin that was going to go to the scrap yard, he had to throw them in a bin that would be taken by union workers to the other bin outside the door. The door was less than 10 feet from his bending machine! Incidentally, all of the tubing was brand new! Each piece was five feet long cold rolled. Just damn stupid and damn ignorant! A pitiful state of affairs...
The Jalopy Journal
