PICTURE CAPTION : Operator Lawrence Dunn, checks a product post-production. Rex Upton’s Christchurch company, Autobend, has 30 years experience in exhausts and mandrel tube bending. The company is big in the business of replacement exhausts, universal mufflers, headers, big bore, extensions, U Bends, tube, flanges, converters, studs and gaskets; you name it, Autobend stock the lot. However, if you are an architect, design engineer, developer, kinetic artist, dairyman or wine, boat or furniture maker. Autobend’s clarion-call is: ‘don’t weld it; bend it.’ You should be dropping by at their Andromeda Crescent premises and stepping into a spotless, engineering shop where their blue-and-yellow brute has recently been installed. It is New Zealand’s biggest mandrel tube-bender, the CSM 100TBRE-RBE, courtesy of Autobend. And they’ve backed that significant investment with a smart, young engineer, one of their own James Patterson, a production manager, who joined them since gaining NZCE James has alongside him an experienced and highly-qualified CNC machine operator and a ‘master of the black art of ‘adjustment’ in a precise business’, Lawrence Dunn, also blessed with experienced hands and not that many ‘miles on his clock’ who has just returned from his OE. You get the sense they are up for anything which isn’t dangerous or dumb. Anything from 1-180 degrees (the latter has a u-bend in it). The CSM bender is world class technology, offering high-precision bending and rolling of tubes, supported throughout by an internal mandrel – a series of inter-connected metal ‘balls’ of a matching diameter – and a carriage boost. This results in an absence of humps, bumps and wrinkles, or any elongation of bend. According to Patterson, Autobend staff can programme variable radii (when rolling tubes) or produce straight and concentric coils, with CNC precision, as well as repeat bending and rolling to the original specifications. […]