Calculating force to bend a rod?

[Kevin Sevcik]

Awesome job on the bend, Don. Also, I think I figured the elongation of your original bend too conservatively. I was figuring based on the inner radius being at 0% elongation, but as I think about it, that's patently false. Zero strain would be at the neutral axis at or near the midplane of the rod. So instead, your just completed bend would have a theoretical 20% elongation on the most extreme fibers. Your original bend would have been a 33% elongation. Which actually probably makes more sense now that I sanity check things. (Sanity check being, at 0 bend radius, the first method would give infinite elongation) At any rate, the tighter bend still would probably have been pushing things, just not by the insane amount I originally thought.