When considering a pipe bender, you may often hear the term "stacked metal pipe bender" or "stacked tool," but what does that mean? Do you need such a tool? What are the benefits of stacking tools?

What Stacked Tooling is:

Not any pipe bender can be "stacked pipe bending machine", the design of the machine must not only contain additional tools, but also can according to need to move up and down on the stack (tube) the position of mandrel and workpiece, and the position of the head can move up and down ,left and right, usually use servo motor to drive, can achieve a higher accuracy, Of course, in some cases, hydraulic cylinders can also be used to drive.

Figure 1   Multi-Stack toolings

Benefits of Stacked Tooling: 

The benefit of this feature is that since the bending die controls the radius of the tube being bent, having multiple dies allows work with multiple radius to be done in one setting, resulting in better part accuracy and less material handling. Stacked Toolings can also be used when a product has a very large bending radius (> 6x OD) that requires push-bending.

Do you need Stacked Tooling for your application?:

Usually if you are dealing with a product that has multiple complex radius. Having a machine that stacks tools can save you a lot of material handling time, because you can do multiple steps on one machine and don't need to change molds, as well as reducing worker fatigue and waste. In addition, the cycle time to complete a product on a stack bender is greatly reduced, allowing for high volume production, thus improving overall profitability.

Figure 2   BLMA  multi-stack pipe bending machine