SWAG Off Road 20 TON Finger Brake Heavy Duty 'Fully Welded'

I've become accustomed to only ordering from brands that are Prime and offer free returns, so I was a little hesitant to order from SWAG, but they were the only ones making a product like this, and once I received this I knew it was worth it. I assembled and welded up the kit in just a couple of hours, and immediately put it to work on my 20 ton press. It bends up to 1/8 inch plate without hesitation. When I started bending some 3/16, it does seem to flex slightly at the bottom of the stroke, but I don't see any permanent deformation. Only feedback would be that I think they could have used a thicker plate/channel for the bottom piece, but overall I'm very happy and have already ordered another product from SWAG.

Not 100% "Made in America" as splash advertised everywhere by SWAG Off Road, all hardware and the round machined collar are made in china!

We tried bending some smallish pieces of steel to make a sign. Quickly discovered that there is no way to be reproducible or hold any kind of tolerance with this setup. Scrapped the entire project and ended up welding corners instead of bending them. It's fine for general use but don't expect to get consistent, accurate bends where you want them.

About 1 year ago I purchased the Swag Offroad 20" Finger press brake after I had done a lot of research on it. I needed something that I could use to bend up to 3/8 steel and the Swag 20" finger brake seemed like it would do the job. My press is not a Harbor Freight special and so the brake could have been a touch longer…now I see that Swag now has 30" brake…go figure. But back to my review.All in all the material seems to be well made upon first glance. Plates appear to be cut out on a laser and fairly strait edges. Keep in mind that I own and operate a metal fabrication shop and I have been welding up drag race car chassis for around 20 years. So when the Swag brake showed up in the mail I went to work securing the base for welding and assembly. Everything was welded together and then I performed a test bend. My test bend was on a 1 inch piece of 11g scrap that I had laying around…and it bent well. Upon testing a wider bend on 11g I noticed that the left edge of the bend was about 30 degrees out of the right side of the bend…and this is what has drove me nuts for months.I tried everything I could think of to fix this…I talked with Swag several times over this issue…and the positive note here is that they did take the time to help me try to address it, but due to a lot of frustration over the bend issues I packed it up in a box and put it on the shelf…I had hoped that I could save some money by in house bending my parts…but I wound up spending weeks of re-engineering efforts to try to straighten out my bends. As we all are aware time is money…and me working on fixing this bender was just a lot of time waisted where I could have been making more on customer work.I recently had a slowdown with customer work and decided to pull the bender back out. I have CNC capabilities so I CNC probed all the pieces of the bender looking for anything that would cause the issue. To my surprise I uncovered that the base was warped on the bottom in the middle. From edge to edge across the bottom U channel it was raised in the middle 79 thousandths…which does not seem like a lot but it aloud the bender to rock under pressure until it settled and it could be anywhere at that point in relation to the bending die top. Upon further investigation the top of the U channel was also out of square where one corner was higher than the other. And to my amazement looking at the " SWAG 20 TON "FLAT TOP" ADJUSTABLE BOTTOM V DIE"… This was also bowed (most likely due to the cutting factor of the laser…and yes I can say that because I also own a Fiber Laser cutting machine and I have seen that exact behavior when parts get hot during cutting…or metal material stresses are released due to the cut).To correct all these issues I chucked up the brake base in my CNC mill and ensured that edge to edge were the same distance to my table surface (all four corners). I then milled the base flat. Once that was done I turned it over and milled the top of the U channel square to the base that I just cut. After that I put the slightly bent parts of "SWAG 20 TON "FLAT TOP" ADJUSTABLE BOTTOM V DIE" in my press and "re-curved" them so that they would lay flat without any bow to them. I then moved on to removing the 90 degree corners from the top of the "flat top die" and gave them a 1/8" radius cut on my CNC. I then probed everything again and this time everything was square and true.Testing the brake yielded much better results…however, trust has to be earned and built up over several test…so I am still testing this brake out to ensure that my bends correctly…but it my early assessment of all the modification seems to show great improvements.I wanted to make this post so that everyone who might be having issues could use it as a means to help identify what could be wrong with the brake and the bends…and I hope that my weeks of time spent in fixing the brake saves others from the same torment.

great product. i had everything welded and using in less than an hour. i bent a couple of pieces and did great. ill buy the extra plates later on for it for tighter bends. my local usps would not deliver it because they said it was "extremely heavy!" so my wife went down and grabbed it and through it in the car..... it's not that heavy.now i can start custom building all my jeep parts! thanks SWAG!

Easy to set up. Easier to use. Bent a few test pieces. Nothing for real yet. Still have to weld one piece on that was poorly done. Lots to learn.

It works good for building heavy duty metal brackets

Works as advertised. It easily bends 3/8 inch steel.