Summer breather

I finally finished the modifications to the engine breather tube today. I had ordered a Baileigh tubing bender a while back and the UPS man left the 62 lb box on my front porch last week. I was a little disappointed to find it was made in China, but for $200 I guess it could not be made here. It is really made for steel tubing and conduit so I had to polish the 5/8 die before I could use them. Here is a couple shots of the tool.

It's a bench mounted device made of Chinese steel, the adjustable wheel dies are machined from steel and are acceptable, however the cast iron fixed dies were rough and I had to dress it down with my 5/8 carbide burr. Here you can see the assortment of dies.

Here is another view of the tool.

I ordered this tool because when I tried to bend the 5/8 x 0.035 tubing for the breather tube it came out really ugly with the cheap Harbor Freight bender I had. Here is a shot of the tube I replaced notice the tooling marks and kinked area.

Here are some trial bends using the new bender. One I made with the tube filled with sand and the other two were with the tube empty. When you measure the bend diameters there is only about 0.004 difference.

It does a pretty nice job for a relatively cheap tool.
All this effort was to replace the engine breather pipe. On the Cub the oil temp never gets above about 140 degrees F in the winter and you get a lot of oily water mix coming from the breather . My original installation had this dump out at the back of the cowl and the slop ended up all over the landing gear and bungee covers. My revised summer breather would extend aft along the bottom of the boot cowl and dump just aft of the landing gear. Here is a shot of a trial fitting.

Yes, I will buy some better looking hose clamps after a few test flights. I had resisted installing this because of the way it would look but you hardly notice it with the cowling installed.

I may paint it white after I'm sure it works OK. I flew it to Wakefield and back today and it seemed to work fine. The rest of the day was spent machining this tool. More on that tomorrow.

BC wanted to say Hi to his Mom.