Bending Iron

I chose to bend my sides by hand on a bending iron however didn't want to fork out the vast amount of money to buy a commercial one like the sort sold on websites like touchstone tonewoods and Stewart Macdonald. Instead,  I chose to throw together my own bending iron to save money.

For my bending iron all I used was a Bosch heat gun (sourced for free from my grandad) and a piece of 2 inch aluminium. A thicker piece of pipe made out of steel like a bit of scaffold pole would've been ideal but i just used what I had to hand. Luckily, the piece of pipe fitted snugly over the nozzle of the heat gun (where the hot air is blown out of) and so there was no need for any complex jig to hold the heat gun and the pipe together.

Finally I clamped the assembly to the workbench securely. The only drawback to this method I found was that you had to be careful no to walk directly in front of the end of the pipe as a lot of heat was emitted there however this could be resolved by stuffing some tin foil inside the pipe.

Here is the assembly: