Bending tails

If it's not too daft would a pipe bender work? Or making up a simple wooden former like the metal one you get you get in a bender and using it to shape the cable.

I will go away and lie down.

Dunno about elegant, but I've seen the 'eye' on a fairly large ring spanner used on more than one occasion as the fulcrum to set s.c. cables.

Pipe bender? The overall diameter of 25mm cable isn't a million miles away from 15mm tube. Of course you may want a tighter radius than this provides.

Not only tighter, but often you want little dog legs and other wiggles which are difficult to pull with a bender of that sort.

I've been using an old wooden cotton bobbin for years, nailed to a bit of

CJ

An aged industrial electrician I know made such a device based upon a small hand held pipe bender such as :-

It was made from Delrin scraps, copes with 15mm diameter cable quite happily and produced was because arthritis in his hands was making hand bending impossible.

A bit of hardwood with a hole near one end of it. Round off the edges of the hole on both sides so that it doesn't damage the insulation. Thread over cable and just lever.

I did consider something like that... might be simpler than anything too complex, although Peter's microbore bender might work well.

(it was probably made worse with the particular job I was doing since it needed a fair bit kit squeezed into a limited space - hence there were a few awkward but short runs from a henley into a pair of CUs that had to dodge other things like meters and timers. In the end I found cutting the wire over length so that I had more leverage to work with, and chopping the excess off once formed was one way to do it manually)