Never did I ever expect this thread to become so "hot". I am an older modeler who has been at this hobby for over 35 years, fly mostly warbirds and I'm still learning. The day I stop learning is the day I die. I've bent music wire about everyway possible. I found heating it cherry red, bending then rapidly cooling the metal to be the easiest way but maybe not the best way. Easy to understand why heat it but cooling the metal?? How did I learn this, watching TV and seeing how somebody who does this all the time does it but I failed to catch how he got the hardness back into the metal. I had thought by rapid cooling would do it, it doesn't, that I know by how my gears behave. I've found that the gears I've heated bent easier then the ones I didn't heat. Also the other day, the 5/32 gear that I made and heated and was on my Ultra bent way to easy, even on soft landings. So I took it off the plane and went to bend it back into shape, it snapped in my hand. Now this was a home made gear, first heated, then bent, then rapid cooled in water. That was when I started this threat, there had to be a better way and Dr1 told me about the K & S bender. Well I had already ordered it and when it came in, I took a piece of K & S 3/16 music wire, looked at the picture on the box, and bent two of the niceness landing gears you would want to see. Ahhh, the test came today. I flew the plane today and because of water on our field, you had to make almost carrier landings to stay on dry land and was over a paved surface. Well the plane came in, did a little bounce off the dry area of the paved surface and rolled out onto the grass area where it finally hit some tall grass at the end of the field. Yeah, you're right, it was crazy to fly today. I had less then 1/10 of our field to use for landing and I had to take off in the parking lot. AMA didn't hear this. Result on the gears, they remained exactly the way they were before the flight, not bent at all. All I had to do was dry off the plane and take it home.
Cold bending without having the tool to do it is a pain. Heating makes it easier to bend but looses strength. It seemed like rapid cooling after bending the gear cherry red made my smaller, 5/32 gear both brittle and easier to bend simply because the more times it bent on landings and then being straighten out, the weaker it got to finally, it broke. Now remember, I used two different sizes of wire here but in the past I have found that 3/16 after being heated was weaker in the long run. This is probably because I don't know how to get that strength back into the wire after hot bending. That's the reason for this threat, for me to learn something new.
Merry Christmas guys and PIECE !!!
Larry