OFFSET: Conduit Bending

You are on a lift with a stick of three-quarter EMT and a bender, and the phone in your pocket does not know what a shrink is. OFFSET tells you where to put your marks — and then watches you make the bend. Give it the height you need and the angle you want. It gives you back the distance between marks, the shrink, and how far from the end of the pipe the first mark goes — in inches and sixteenths, the way it is written on the pipe, not as a decimal you have to convert on a ladder. LAY THE PHONE ON THE PIPE Every other bending app hands you a number and goes back in your pocket, which leaves the part where mistakes actually happen unwatched. OFFSET reads the angle off the phone's own tilt sensor. Rest it on the straight leg, tap Zero, and pull — a tone climbs as you close on the angle and holds steady when you are on it, because at that moment both hands are on the handle and a screen is no use to anyone. IT LEARNS YOUR SPRINGBACK Steel does not stay where you put it. Pull to thirty, let go, and the pipe relaxes a few degrees short. The phone never leaves the conduit, so it knows what you pulled to and what it settled at, and the difference is your springback. After a few bends it stops guessing and starts telling you to pull to thirty-three for a thirty — for your bender, at your size, in your hands. BENDS • Offset • Rolling offset, for a run that moves sideways and up at once • Kick • Three-point saddle, over a pipe or a beam • Four-point saddle, over something wide • 90-degree stub-up to a finished height • Back-to-back 90s FILL • Conduit fill to NEC Chapter 9, Tables 1, 4 and 5 • Box fill to NEC 314.16(B) YOUR BENDER, NOT A GENERIC ONE Take-up is a property of the tool in your hand. Pick Klein, Ideal, Greenlee, Milwaukee, Gardner Bender or Southwire in EMT or rigid, or enter your own. If the number stamped on your bender disagrees with the book, correct it — the correction is kept for that bender and that size, and every calculation after it uses your figure. TWO DRAWINGS, NOT ONE The top drawing is the finished bend. The bottom one is the stick as it is right now — straight, on the floor, with the marks where the pencil actually goes and dashed lines joining each bend to the mark that makes it. Take hold of the grip on the drawing and the height follows your thumb, a sixteenth at a time, with the marks moving as it changes. BUILT FOR A JOBSITE • Big type and big targets, so it works in gloves • Dark screen, so it does not blind you in a dark ceiling • Step a number a sixteenth at a time, or tap it and type it on a keypad that works in fractions instead of decimals • Every answer shows its working, so you can check it before you pull the handle • No account, no ads, no subscription, and no signal needed to calculate • Free to use for offsets, 90-degree stub-ups and the angle gauge THE MATH The multipliers are the field-standard ones you were taught — 6, 2.6, 2, 1.4 and 1.2 — not raw trigonometry, so the marks agree with the numbers printed on your bender and with what the journeyman next to you worked out in his head. Saddles use their own multipliers, because a 22.5-degree bend in a saddle is not the same as a 22.5-degree bend in an offset. ANY ANGLE, NOT JUST FIVE Your bender is stamped for 10, 22.5, 30, 45 and 60, and those five carry the taught multipliers. But an obstacle sits where it sits, so you can type any angle from 1 to 90 and the app falls back to the trigonometry those taught values approximate — and tells you, on screen, which of the two it used. Inches and NEC. This is the US edition. OFFSET is a calculation aid, not a substitute for your own training or for the code. Take-up, radius and springback differ between benders, so check every figure against the tool in your hands and measure the bend before you cut. Terms of Use: https://sirekapps.com/terms Privacy Policy: https://sirekapps.com/privacy