Stick Builder

You list the bends in order from one end of the stick (end A): a 90 stub or a kick with 90 at either end, and offsets, 3-point saddles, 4-point saddles and segmented 90s in between, each with its own inputs. Every mark is that bend family's own result: an offset's two marks its travel apart, a saddle's three at its spacing, a segmented 90's at its shot spacing, a stub's at its stub height minus the take-up. The stick only places them: each bend sits "from" inches past the previous bend's last mark, or past end A when it is the first bend, measured between pencil marks on the straight pipe. A distance you measured to an obstruction or to the back of a bend is not that: the bender manuals say to add the family's shrink to it first, and so does this page. For the worked stick in 1/2 inch EMT (a 12 inch stub, a 4 inch offset at 30 degrees 24 inches on, a 3 inch saddle at 45 degrees 30 inches on, a 12 inch stub 30 inches on) the marks fall at 7, 31, 39, 69, 76.5, 84, 114 inches from end A and the cut length is 121 inches.

Every station in the table is from end A, the end you listed the bends from, and the table also prints each mark from end B and from the previous mark. A 90 stub or a kick at end A is laid out from end A by its own family's rule (the 90 mark at stub height minus the 5 inch take-up in 1/2 inch EMT); a stub or kick at end B is laid out from END B the same way, so on the pipe you hook the tape on end B for those marks. The "measured by its family from" column says which. That is why a stub or kick can only be the first or the last bend: its marks are measured from a pipe end, and there is no pipe end in the middle of a stick.

It is the pipe between consecutive marks, summed from end A to end B: a stub's piece is its stub height minus the take-up (the family's own rule), each later bend adds the distance to its first mark and its own mark spacings, and the tail past the last mark (or the last stub's piece) closes it. For the worked stick in 1/2 inch EMT that is 7 + 24 + 8 + 30 + 7.5 + 7.5 + 30 + 7 = 121 inches. Shrink is not folded in: the offsets' and saddles' shrink is printed beside the cut length, the way each family prints its own. A stick of two stubs is not the back-to-back calculator: that tool lays the second 90 out by the star point from the first stub's end and its cut length carries the field gain, so the same two marks give a cut length take-up minus gain apart per 90 across the two tools (2.58 inches in 1/2 inch EMT). Both are the manuals' own methods; use the back-to-back page for a U you measure back to back.

Yes. The picture is built in developed stations: every corner is placed so that the point where its mark lands on the bent pipe sits at that mark's station, and an end 90 is drawn at its full stub height with its arrow the take-up from the tip, the family's own rule. So the finished centerline measures the cut length (121 against 121 inches for the worked stick in 1/2 inch EMT, within the arc sampling), every yellow band sits on its own bend, and the drawn legs are the pipe's legs. The calculator prints both lengths, and the gate holds them equal over a grid of sticks in every size.

One check over the whole stick: the pipe between any two consecutive marks, less the pipe each arc consumes at the size's NEC Chapter 9, Table 2 radius, must be at least zero, and the two end pieces are checked too. Past its arrow an end 90 consumes the take-up less half an OD, minus the radius of straight, and then the quarter arc, and the kick calculator checks the same pipe past its own 90 (both read one rule since item 13, so a kick the kick calculator answers answers in a stick at the same inputs). A refusal names the bend and the segment and the smallest change that works, re-run through every segment of the stick, or the pair where two segments are short. A 4 inch offset at 30 degrees whose first mark is 2 inches past a 12 inch stub's 90 mark in 1/2 inch EMT is refused: the 90 consumes 6.93 inches of pipe past its arrow and the 30 degree arc 1.07 more, and the smallest distance that works is 8-1/16". The stick also measures how close any two legs that share no bend come on the finished pipe, wall to wall, and refuses a stick that would pass through itself.

The single-bend marks come from the bender manuals this site holds: the stub mark by the deduct each of them tells you to apply (the take-up values are Klein and Gardner Bender's; Greenlee publishes no table and tells you to read the deduct off your bender casting), and the offset and saddle multipliers from their charts. The developed length of a segmented 90 is geometry, stated on its own page, because none of these documents prints a segmented-bend table. None of them prints a chain formula across different families: Greenlee's Example 3 lays one 3-bend saddle out cumulatively from the conduit end with the shrink added, and the star-point back-to-back has its own calculator here. So the way this page puts single-bend marks together is stated as the site's own rule, in the words above, and the tool never invents a mark: it places each family's own.

It does not go around an obstruction (the compound 90 calculator does that for one corner, and clearing an obstruction with a whole stick is a different problem), it does not roll one bend out of another's plane (every bend here lies in one plane and turns left or right; the marks and the cut length of a rolled stick are the same, but this tool's self-clearance check is in one plane, so it may refuse a rolled stick that clears in the field), and it does not lay out a rack of parallel sticks (the parallel offset calculator does that). It composes up to 12 bends.