(06-14-2014, 12:41 PM)DaveH Wrote: The more I look at this, the more I am beginning to think that two lengths of angle welded to a base plate should be perfectly good. Then I see the 'Swagoffroad' bender, with the angle welded to a 'U' channel and I wonder why go to all that trouble to make a 'U' channel. There must be a reason, anyone have any thoughts about it?

DaveH

Just a guess Dave, but think it probably has to do more with the attachments they have available for their press brakes. The stop bars for example bolt up to the vertical plate in the rear so they sit parallel to the press. It's a good place to attach the guide pins as well.



They would have to supply additional brackets to weld to the angle iron in order to do that. Also the bottom channel has fingers in the front that are bent to form stop plates that hold the brake centered in the press frame front to back. They probably figure it's just a cleaner look forming the channel like that as all one piece. Just a guess on my part though.

One thing I wondered about when I opened the box on my kit, is that my channel didn't have the "ears" sticking out in front to clamp it to the press frame and hold it centered.

I also found a couple of extra slugs of steel in the box that I thought were just "drops" from them laser cutting the steel to make the channel. After doing some more head scratching I figured out that the slugs were meant to be welded to the ends of the channel to serve as the stop ears.
There was no mention of this in the instructions provided because they were for a standard kit.

I went ahead and emailed Troy at SWAG just to be sure about that, and he confirmed that that was indeed the case. He also said that they HAD to do it that way in order to get the kit to fit into the USPS flat rate box. Leaving it in one piece made it too wide and they had to ship them UPS instead which greatly increased the shipping costs.