you guys would laugh yourselves silly at my bender. due to my particular circumstances, and since i have modest fab skills, i built my bender using a couple of those cheapy plans you see offered in different places. after studying those plans and looking at several pro benders both in person and picture form, it took me a couple of months to come up with a workable tool that fit my needs and did a great job. i made a 1 3/4" and a 1 5/8" set of dies as well. the bends came out perfect with no dimples or crush, and that surprised me because i had to guess on the clearances needed to free the tube after bending. i only had one project to do [my 33 dodge humpback panel] and it was just mild steel, so it worked as intended and wasn't that hard to use even with just a 16ton, long ram bottle jack as power. since that time, i experimented with adapting my dies to smaller diameter tube sizes using the spacer method shown, and that worked well also. at my age, i won't be building cages for a living, although from time to time, this contraption is broke out to make a couple of pickup push bars and a riding tractor head bar. worked good for those projects as well. a "muscle" machine might be ok for a one time project, but if a guy was thinking to bend tube on a regular basis, a "power adder" supplement would be the only way to fly, as well as several of other previously mentioned must have features.