I just found a shop 15 miles from me that has a mandrel bending machine and just charges $50 an hour to do labor... now I can get my intercooler pipes made to perfection instead of hacking up U-bends that I bought from Summit

In case anyone is wondering why a mandrel machine is so cool for us here in the boonies, there allegedly is only 1 in a 100 mile radius of me... and the "bender" has cancer and has been on sick leave for weeks, who knows when he'll be back...

Like I said, excited for no reason

Well, now I get to have decent intercooler pipes and a nice downpipe, does that count enough for a reason?

 

thats good enough for me, and its friday too =)

mike

 

so it is.... friday is always a good reason to be happy/excited...

 

I was gonna start a post on somethign similar so I will just add it here. I found a sub contractor to the air craft manufaturer I work for will make custom piping. The owner is a car nut he has several old muscle cars. All of them have aircraft style piping for exhaust and intake. I discussed the 20b FC that I'm planning and he said it would be a blast to help out with the plumbing of it. Imagine lightwieght aluminum aircraft piping custom bent routing the intake to the FMIC to the twins to the intake


god this could be so cool if it works out

sorry to brag but im excited too and the 13b isnt even out yet.

 

I know exactly what you mean!

 

Um, doesn't everyone use aluminum?

It's nice for the owner to help you out with the mandrel bends, as this will save you a lot of work and/or money.

BTW, "lightweight aircraft aluminum" is a marketing tag that other industries use as a sales pitch. There is no such particular alloy, as quite a large number of aluminum alloys are used in aircraft fabrication as the situation dictates. Just about any aluminum tubing that they have laying around the shop should work fine for your intake.

 

yes but this shop only does aluminim piping for the F16s. And the piping they use is about half the wieght that I have found in other shops around here. It also has an insulating compund sprayed on it to reduce heat transfer in the aircraft.

But your right any piping would work

 

Cool, what's the alloy?

 

My bet it's T6061...


-Ted

 

it is t6061 i called him this afternoon. but its thinner than most piping Ive found

 

LOL, that's just about as generic as you can get. Regardless, it will be perfect for your intake system. Happy mandrel bending!

Hmm, RETed must be psychic. Hey Ted, I'm thinking of 6 numbers between 1 and 53. I bet you can't guess what they are.

 

YOu said 1-53, but I bet they were all "69".


-Ted

 

No, H-Ted, I've got bigger and better things in mind. Er, mostly.

http://www.lottoonlineservice.com/lotto.html

 

thats the r26b budget...

mike