Hoop House Pipe Bending Woes

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This hoop house pipe bender from Bootstrap Farmer was a bust. The radius of the jig was too large for the 1-3/8” pipe typically used to form the arch on hoop houses. We made numerous attempts to adjust the radius of this faulty tool that helped a lot but our pipes still had kinks in them. This whole exercise in frustration was exacerbated by our pre-drilling the pipes prior to bending.

We don’t know if the jig that had “12 ft.” written on it was improperly labeled, welded up wrong, or what. What we do know is that using the jig straight out of the box and as described in their videos was giving us 14-15 foot diameter hoops using 1-3/8” pipe.

At a 14-15 foot diameter, it took quite a bit of force to compress these too-wide arches down to the required 12 feet. So much so, that it was clear they would end up splaying open our ground pipes that stick 2 feet out of the ground - hence our attempts to reduce the diameter down to 12 feet. In the end, we sent this jig back with the hope that Bootstrap Farmer gets the message and makes improvements - we're sure they will. For those interested, here's the other video on this pipe bender: https://www.bitchute.com/video/pOu0kWOWJfHy/