Bend radius is important in adding strength but no where near as important as material and design. I'm not sure how painting tubing bends it, but I am probably the guy here that built a rig that has been run over by a truck.and survived it. Tell me to paint the tube blue and it bends itself, but then tell me that you use a 1/2' radius, that's cool. I'm an Engineer not an artist, I want the cage to be strong enuf to be run over by a truck or survive a fall off a big ass hill.ĩ9% of the time this is just for fun, but there are some very real and cool engineering problems to be worked out, these are real vehicles they're just smaller. I just wanted a simple answer, or even a picture, so I can compare the diameter of the shock hoop to the diameter of the wheel and figure it out. According to the bending characteristics of 5052O Al-alloy tube with 50 mm 1 mm and 75 mm 1.5 mm 66, taking the wrinkling and wall thinning as the indices, the bending limits (including critical radius and critical bending angle) were obtained, respectively. The only thing I could do was put it into the 3D prototyping scanner's vat along with a picture of what I wanted to build and then, presto. First I tried painting the tubes blue,then red, but once the red and blue mixed, the whole mess melted into a purple metallic glop.
