today i'm going to show you how to use this simple hand tool to bend metal conduit into awesome builds like this stay tuned [Music] hey everybody my name is dave welcome back to the channel today i'm going to show you how to bend emt conduit emt conduit is an ordinary metal tubing you can get at your local hardware store and it makes a great diy building material as well being able to bend it is really useful and helpful both for practical and fun diy projects it might seem intimidating to bend metal tube like this but i promise you i'm going to show you exactly how to do it and if you've done it before i'm going to show you some tips and tricks so you can get it done a little bit quicker and better the tool we're going to use is this emt conduit bender which is a super great value it's less than 35 dollars you can pick it up anywhere electricians use it all the all the time and there's a lot of ways to bend metal pipe but this is by far the most economical and simple way to do it it has a a cast die on the head of it and a long handle and what you do is you place the conduit into the bender like that and you're going to apply leverage through the handle and then this foot rest and you're going to pull push down and then it bends the conduit up against a flat surface i want to show you some of the markings on the head of the bender so you know what they mean the first one is this arrow here and that's for aligning where you're going to put the bend in the conduit and if you want the bend 12 inches from the end you put a mark there and it makes sense to put it all the way around so no matter how it's oriented you can line it up exactly with that mark and that's where the radius is going to start then if you want different angles you've got these marks here that you're going to align the conduit so as you bend if you want a 45 degree you just keep bending until the conduit is parallel with that line and you can go all the way up to a 90 degree bend here here's some other things this is obviously for three quarters inch emt and it has a six inch radius so that's what that's saying right here here's a piece of conduit that i bent earlier with this vendor and if you can imagine the center of that radius right here it's going to be six inches and then that goes all the way around so if you're calculating how long you need to put that bend or how much that's going to take up you've got it right here on the bender face one of the other important markings on this conduit bender is this star right here and what that does it allows you to do a u-bend and get two bends parallel to each other so if we want these legs to be 24 inches apart we're gonna go ahead and mark this at 24 inches roughly it's really important to keep the bender and your first bend in the same plane because if you if you bend it this way or that way you're gonna get what's called a dog leg and it'll be pretty crooked so we match up the star get it aligned roughly in the same plane and then step and bend this side to about 90 degrees and you want to stop just short of where the the shoe piece meets the conduit and then take your bend off now one cool trick is i over bent this angle you can see it's a little bit past 90 degrees so in this bender and a lot of benders you've got a really cool trick where you can insert the conduit that you over bent or have to adjust into the handle and you can see it's flared out here to to go over the conduit and then it gives you this long handle to apply uh leverage and get that back to where you want it see it's really easy to take it off and then we've we've gotten back to that measurement and now we look right there and we're really close to that 24 inch distance we want and that's extremely helpful if you're trying to do a table leg or some other u-shaped bend you're definitely going to want to know that trick i hope you guys found that useful if you want more tips and tricks about how to build with conduit check out this video thanks everybody for watching