My experience with attempting to bend tubing is that , for me anyway, stainless steel tubing was impossible to do manually. It was just too strong. I made my bimini and dodger for Dauntless from aluminum tubing. Stainless is definitely preferred as it is much more rigid, but it is much much more difficult to work with (and expensive) if you don't have a true tubing bender. The other challenge with the conduit bender is trying to both ,match the amount of bend, and more importantly, getting the two bent ends parallel. Looks like it should be easy...but for me...no. :-) On the dodger I took old bent bimini frames that were thrown away as junk...I cut the curved sections out of them and spliced them together with straight sections of tubing...that way I didn't have to bend anything. Our local scrap yard had a ton of bent bimini frames in a tub to be recycled and sold a couple to me for pennies on the dollar compared to buying new tubing....I cut the good sections out and then used 3/4 tubing to splice 7/8 tubing together. Yeah....I'm cheap! hahaha Sean M23 Dauntless _www.havasumontgomerys.piczo.com_ (http://www.havasumontgomerys.piczo.com)