I normally find that 16mm^2 and 25mm^2 tails are not too difficult to bend and form by hand when required, however the last lot of 25mm^2 I got from TLC seemed much stiffer than normal - perhaps its a different brand from their usual.
Anyone got any particularly elegant ways of bending and forming large singles like these without damaging or scuffing the insulation?
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
2x2 . Rough and ready yes but it works.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)
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