What is the first bend to learn?

The 90° stub-up. It teaches you to read the bender, to trust the take-up figure, and to measure a mark from the end — the habits every other bend builds on. Get a stub landing on the mark every time before you move to offsets.

Why does my bend keep coming out at the wrong height or short?

Two usual causes. Wrong height on a 90 means the take-up figure is off for your bender — derive it from a test bend. A run finishing short means you forgot shrink on an offset or saddle. Add the shrink to your measurement before the first mark.

Do I bend EMT and rigid the same way?

The geometry is identical — an angle is an angle. What changes is take-up and gain, which grow with the pipe’s radius, and the effort. Use the figure stamped on the bender for the pipe you are actually bending, and the same multipliers and shrink apply.

How to bend conduit

Bending conduit is one idea repeated: read a number off the job, turn it into a mark on the pipe with a bit of trigonometry, and pull the same angle every time. This is the order the bends tend to come in as you learn them, and the calculator that does the arithmetic for each. None of it is a code question — it is all geometry, and a wrong number costs a stick of pipe, not a life.

Before anything: read the bender

Every bender has an arrow, a back-of-bend reference (often a star or a notch), and a take-up figure stamped for each pipe size. Take-up is the length the 90 sweep eats, and it belongs to that tool — there is no universal chart, so read it or derive it. If you have lost it, one test bend gives it back on the bender take-up page.

The 90° stub-up

Start here. You want a leg of a set height, so mark height − take-up from the end, line the arrow up with the mark, and bend to 90°. When your stubs land on the mark every time, the bender and the take-up are working. The stub-up calculator does the subtraction.

The offset — the workhorse

An offset is two equal bends that step a run over an obstacle and level it out. Pick an angle, multiply the rise by the multiplier for the distance between marks, and add the shrink to your measurement so the far end still reaches. This is the bend you make most; the offset calculator and the shrink calculator cover it, and the multiplier reference lists every angle. A tiny version, the box offset, seats a connector into a knockout.

Saddles — going over something

To cross an obstruction rather than step past it, you saddle over it. A three-point saddle peaks to a centre bend over a round pipe; a four-point saddle uses two offsets and a flat top for a beam or duct. Both are offsets in disguise, so the same multiplier and shrink turn up again.

Two 90s and a kick

Set two 90s a fixed distance apart and you have a back-to-back bend, a squared U — the second bent off the back-of-bend reference so the backs land true. Add a single bend in the tail of a stub to lift it past something low and you have a kick 90.

When the offset is not in one plane

If a run has to rise and move sideways at once, it is a rolled offset: work the true offset from the rise and roll, roll the pipe to the roll angle, then bend it as an ordinary offset. The trigonometry is the same triangle, one dimension up.

Big sweeps and groups

A radius too wide for one pull becomes a segmented bend — many small bends spaced along the pipe. Run several conduits through the same corner and you keep them even with concentric bends; step a whole rack over together with parallel offsets.

The whole reference

Every formula behind these is written out on the formulas page, and the words — shrink, gain, take-up, developed length, springback — are defined in the glossary.

Questions

What is the first bend to learn?: The 90° stub-up. It teaches you to read the bender, to trust the take-up figure, and to measure a mark from the end — the habits every other bend builds on. Get a stub landing on the mark every time before you move to offsets.
Why does my bend keep coming out at the wrong height or short?: Two usual causes. Wrong height on a 90 means the take-up figure is off for your bender — derive it from a test bend. A run finishing short means you forgot shrink on an offset or saddle. Add the shrink to your measurement before the first mark.
Do I bend EMT and rigid the same way?: The geometry is identical — an angle is an angle. What changes is take-up and gain, which grow with the pipe’s radius, and the effort. Use the figure stamped on the bender for the pipe you are actually bending, and the same multipliers and shrink apply.