Hi Pilou, Boolean, Zooen,

Thanks for your helpful illustrations of your methods! As Zooen noted initially, there are tools in MoI that I don't use or do not use very much, thus I'm less aware of what they can do and I don't pull them out. The Sweep and Deform tools are ones I will try to incorporate more often after seeing these examples, thank you!

When I'm bending rod (either hot or cold) I need to be mindful of the centerline of the rod and how the metal flows and deforms during the bending process. An interesting challenge is to know where to start a bend so I need to think about the radius of the material and how it will be deformed during the bend...visualize what will happen and then work backwards to know where to begin the bend. The clothespin spring illustration is an excellent example of how MoI is able to produce the finished result in the model, but for me that's just a step towards being able to be able to reproduce that part in metal. I think that the beauty of the Sweep tool is that it requires me to define the curve of the centerline of the material and then sweep a profile over it...from there I think I can work backwards to figure out just where to begin bends. Having the model also facilitates the process of figuring out a sequence of steps and the different types of bending processes. To better illustrate the metal bending I'm talking about here are a couple of references: https://www.diacro.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Art-Of-Bending_2013.pdf, https://www.hossfeldbender.com/applications.html. There are many other benders out there but Di-Acro and Hossfeld are representative of the main types of manual benders.

--Larry