Homemade Bracelet Bender

[nhcowboy1961]

HI all, I tried my hand at making a sterling silver Western bright cut bracelet and like how it came out-not too bad for a first attempt Now after having made it I needed to bend it and remembered the GRS bracelet bender I use at my GRS course with Dianne Scalese last spring (worth every penny until doomsday). I recalled at the time thinking why buy one when you can make one so I finally did and it works great! Plus, it only cost me 88 cents in bolts-the metal and thermo-loc I already had on hand. Being a metal worker has its advantages and I love making tools.

I just winged the design and it only took about 1-1/2 hours or so to cut and weld together. I used an old prescription bottle cut down and bolted that onto the base and filled that in with warm thermo-loc and pressed a Round ceramic Chinese decorative ball ($1.00 at Christmas Tree Shop) to get my curve and let that harden. Then I stuck the whole thing in the snow to get the Thermo-loc base cold, warmed up another piece for the male top end (snugged over a threaded bolt and coincidentally fitting into side holes to keep it in place), added some water as a release agent to the bottom thermo loc and pressed into place and let harden.

It works like a charm and only cost me 88 cents to make-Yankee Ingenuity at its best (or for you southerners "Southern engineering OK I'm cheap, but why spend a few hundred $$ and wait for shipping when I started in the morning and had the bracelet bender made and the bracelet formed by lunch time?

If anybody wants to know more about how I made it I’d be happy to go into further details-great fun though and yet another home-made tool in the arsenal, it doesn’t get any better than that.
Paul

 

[nhcowboy1961]

PS: If I get ambitious enough or have the time I'll bright cut the metal on the bender and really jazz it up; then again I may kust spray paint the darn thing and call it a day.

 

[Rick Eaton]

Paul,
Great tips on the bender, shows some Southern engineering works, when you need a tool for a job. I'll have to make one for my shop. Thanks for sharing. I love seeing home made jigs tools show what possibilities there are if you need something done, and don't have the tool for the job. Wouldn't have thought of thermal loc for that, now hears another use. A must have for a shop.
All the best
Rick

 

[Kevin P.]

Very cool and the bracelet ain't bad. The best tools are the ones we make ourselves. I used to use a little league baseball bat; but when my bracelet is ready I'm going to try your invention.

 

[monk]

Great, but my grs former was well under a hundred bucks !

 

[Dulltool]

My GRS bender was 200 clams..... I made it back with the sale of only one bracelet.

 

[Peter E]

Cool...nice bracelet too.

Thanks for posting it.

Peter

 

[Mack]

That is great. I love making tools and saving money too. Even if a store bought one is only a hundred bucks, you saved $ 99.12 and that aint bad. You can buy some other stuff now.

 

[Dave London]

Thanks
Yankee use it up, wear it out, make it do. Good job

 

[Weldon47]

Paul,

Great job on both!!!


WL

 

[Jim Sackett]

Paul
I love it. One question; was the femail die made out of an empty beer can? If so that would be the frosting on the cake.

Jim

 

[monk]

i absolutely love thermoloc, but am way curious as to how it will hold up to the bashing it will get in the forming process. true, it wouldn't take much to make a new die set. you shoud try for the double curve next time. makes for a stronger, neater looking bracelet.take a rasp and give the male die a 2nd curve and finish with fine grit paper.

 

[ken dixon]

I've used thermoloc to make a couple of different silver forming dies. It works great and holds up very well. Nice job on the bracelet. Ken

 

[nhcowboy1961]

Paul
I love it. One question; was the femail die made out of an empty beer can? If so that would be the frosting on the cake.

Jim

That's funny Jim, had I thought of it myself it probably would have been a beer can Sadly it's just a plain ordinary prescription pill bottle. I was going to use PVC pipe but thought why leave the house and go all the way down to the hardware store and just poked around in my junk drawer and found that.
Paul

 

[J Saville]

Paul,

It's true great minds think alike. Then again sometimes someone like me just gets lucky with an idea. I used Thermo lock for the same purpose, however I didn't have the means to build the arm used to press it, so I put it in my drill press and used a 2 inch dapping die for the base. Didn't work as well as yours will, because as the bracelet curls around, it hit the drill chuck and I had to finish it on a mandril.

I just bought a small welder, so I'll try one like yours.

Thanks for the pictures.

John

 

[Kevin P.]

It looks to me that the form of the bracelet is flat. Do you think your design could be made to slightly dome the bracelet? Does that make sense?
Kevin

 

[nhcowboy1961]

It looks to me that the form of the bracelet is flat. Do you think your design could be made to slightly dome the bracelet? Does that make sense?
Kevin

Hi Kevin, the bracelet actually does have a slight dome to it but it could be more, just hard to tell in the pictures. I like Monk's idea which I'll try, and make the top part of the "plunger" more rounded so that it doesn't exactly match the inside curve of the female die and that should make the dome much more pronounced. In retrospect the cup on the bottom and the plunger male part at the top should be of a lesser diameter-an easy fix to be sure. It could stand a little tweaking to get exactly what I'm after and my next improvement to it is to have the top plunger part removable for inserting different raidused dies made of thermo-loc or even a small trailer ball hitch thing. Some will have a steeper dome and some less, I'll use practice plates of copper to get what I'm after. I was even thinking I could make a double ridged type of affair so I'll play around with that too-beauty is if I don't like how it looks I'll just reheat the thermo-loc and go at it again. When I have the curve I like best I'll cast the dies in lead and have a more permanent set up tweaked just so.

I may even make sturdier male and female dies from lead weights poured into steel piping cut down and those could be easily made to fit on a track sort of thing to interchange when needed. It's a prototype design for what I'm after for sure but right off the bat I'm happy with what it accomplishes, plus I engraved the heck out of the handle and it looks pretty sweet now
Paul

 

[CRW]

Hi Paul,

Hope you don't mind that I copied your idea on a bracelet bender. Since I don't have a welder, I made mine out of some very seasoned White Oak. It works great. I made my first bracelet yesterday and had to have a way to bend it. I remembered reading your post, so I looked it up to see exactly how you did it. I had to make the die twice. The first time I did not have enough radius and the bracelet did not have enough curve. I used a small light bulb for the final radius and it worked fine. It had a dome as well as the right curve. Paul this was a great invention you did and I appreciate the post. It really saved me a lot of money. Since I had the white oak and glue, all I had to buy was the bolt and knob. It took me less than one hour to build. Then had to wait on the glue to dry. It was a very easy process.
Here is a couple snapshots of the bender and the bracelet I made. Keep in mind this is my first bracelet and I am a new comer to engraving.

 

[Steve223]

Nice Carl and Paul im going to build me one as soon as i get caught up. Thanks for postin this paul and Carl. By the way Carl your engraveing looks MUCH better than mine when i first started.
Steve