Scratch built pipe elbows?

Look in the pasta aisle of your grocery store.

Pete, what supplies do you have to work with?....styrene, brass, wood...depending on that I could toss out some ideas depending on what you have to work with- each would be different to work with.

Pasta or straws. I used pasta in the corner, just right of the gas meters....

You might wander the craft aisles at a Michaels, Jo Anns, Etc., Hobby Lobby, et al and see if you can find rings of useful material, diameter, thickness.  FI, a full wood ring of would give you 4 elbows, cutting them into 90-degree segments.  Punch/cut out some rings of styrene for flanges.  For more detail and tedium, you could add nut/bolt/washer moldings to the flanges.

On the other hand, I seem to recall that Plastruct has quite an array of pipe elbows and flanges available.  You can go to their website, as did I just now, but I find their printed catalog a lot easier to work from.  Depending on what you're creating and to what expense you're willing to go, I'd give them a try.

Bending metal or plastic tubing to form elbows???...not my idea of fun, if that's what you had in mind.

I'm sure others will chime in with ideas. 

Check out the refinery posted in another thread a couple down from this one.  Perhaps the builder of that magnificent model has some suggestions for you.  I see elbows, but not a lot of pipe flanges. 

Good luck!

KD

I have taken Styrene tubing and heated it with a heat gun and bent it. A few words of caution. It does not take much heat to soften the tubing (found out the hard way). A hair dryer may even be enough heat. Do not over heat it. Practice a few times. Eventually you will find the "sweetspot" where to out side diameter will stretch and the inside diameter will compress in on itself without actually pinching itself off. You will be able to form the elbow with a nice look and without distorting the actual diameter of the tubing at least appearance wise. I did not put the calipers on it to verify.

Just a side note: As mentioned above, this is not an efficient way to do this. I did it because I had a need to form some "O" scale electrical conduit that actually has wires in it and I was able to do it all in one piece.

Pete,

If you are using a wood dowel, cut it in a miter box at 45 degrees on each end. That will give you a 90 degree joint. If you want to make it look a little better, cut four 22-1/2 degree joints to make the 90. This will look good for ducting type pipe. For oil or water lines, you are better off buying Plastruct pipe and fittings. You can buy 45 and 90 degree elbows, flanges, valves, tees and reducers.

Plastruct also has pipe up to 1/8-inch diameter that can be purchased with a brass rod inside it. It can be bent with a pliers and holds its shape.

Alan Graziano

1/16" brass rod bent with round nose plyers.






Brake tubing bender.  Should be available for 1/8", 3/16" and 1/4" tube. Tube sizes are usually ID (Inside Diameter).  There are also benders for copper tubing via plumbing supplies. 1/2" thin wall conduit.  (EMT) Electrical Metallic Tubing starts with a minimum Radius of 5" (Too big)

I use K-S engineering tube benders.  They're cheap i think mine cost $3, and they work.  Though i do believe the largest size is 3/16" so that might be a little small for what you want.  But for smaller diameter brass and aluminum (never used copper, sorry) tubes it works like a charm.  Here's the link, it's down the page a bit.

http://www.ksmetals.com/accessories.html

Good luck with it.

nick

It's funny how after one reads a question or a topic in one of the forums things just seem to jump out at you as far as replies. I had been following this post for awhile and the other day I was cleaning up a bit and came across a large box of various molded roof pieces I had purchased from Frank and what jumped out at me:

The molding sprue forms a perfect 90 degree elbow and even has a long straight secyion of pipe on one end!