Having got this far, we drew out some more lines on our piece of board. First off we drew a line to give us a reference point for the end of the bend at the bottom of the down tubes, then another for where the bottom rails kick out, getting both of these dimensions off the plan we were using. The third line we drew was the dimension for the center of the rear axle slot. Finally we added two more parallel to the center line for the rails after the kick out.

Fig.5

Now for what follows to work properly, it is ABSOLUTELY imperative that the surface you are building off of and your bender are perfectly level. So this might be a good time to check that out with a decent length level. The next step was to bend the kick out for which we need three pieces of information, what plane the bend lies in in relation to the last bend (this is called rotation in bending terminology), what angle it's bent through, and where it has to start. To get the rotation we placed a piece of flat steel against the down tube bends and measured the angle of them.

Fig.6

Fig.6 shows how this is done, it's importatnt that the angle bubble is perpendicular to the board or the reading you get wil be wrong, remember measure twice, cock up half as often.We got 10 degrees here which is in close agreement with the 11 degrees the plan had and was probably due to us using 1" tube and not 1.25". We then measured the angle of the bend off of the plan and drew it onto the board. Then by using the test bend and aligning it so it was parallel with the lower rail and its bend was tangental to the line on the board we go the position of the bend line.

Fig.7

Once we'd transferred the bend line to the rails we were ready to do the next bend. the rail was placed in the bender with the bend line positioned in the right place and then using the steel plate and the angle bubble the down tube bend was set at the correct angle off the vertical. Using the big folding angle finder to gauge the bend (for more detail on this see the "Metric Frame Build" article on this site). Fig.8 shows how the rails are positioned, so that you end up with a pair and not some scrap tube!

Fig.8

The rails were the placed back on the board so we could start measuring up for the next two bends.

Fig.9