Sketch the run the way you always have. Get the bend marks, the take-up, the gain and the cut list before you set the shoe. No CAD. No classes. No desk.
START YOUR 2 WEEKS FREEIf you can sketch a run on a box flap, you can run this app. Your finger is the pencil.
First bend list in ten minutes. It draws the way the trade already reads it.
It lives on the phone in your pocket and works standing at the bender — where the marks actually go on the pipe.
Every bend prints its math — take-up, gain, and the mark. Check every number before you pull the handle.
Drag your finger the way the conduit runs. Legs snap to real directions. Don't know a length? Mark it “?” and it gets solved.
Material, size, and which bender. It carries the take-up for that shoe and the springback for that material instead of you remembering both.
Offsets, kicks, saddles, rolling offsets. Something in the way? Mark it and it dodges, figuring the angle and the added length.
A cut-and-bend list with every mark measured from one end, the gain accounted for, and the sticks, couplings, straps and connectors on the order.
Put your instructions in out loud. It comes back with “got it” so you know it heard you — and that is all it ever says. No follow-up questions. No reading a paragraph back at you. Nothing piping up with “in five hundred feet, make a U-turn” at six on a Monday morning when you had a good weekend and don’t want to hear a voice at all.
You: “Run’s ten foot, six inch offset around the beam”
It: “Got it.”
You: “Make the offset eight inches.”
It: “Got it.”
Then it gets out of your way. Everything it did is on the screen for when you’re ready to look.
The number you lose is the one you read at the top of a ladder and wrote down two minutes later. Say it the second you read it and it’s in the sketch, on the right leg, before you’ve moved.
And the guy who’s been running work for thirty years shouldn’t have to learn to thumb-type to use the tool that carries his own knowledge. He talks. It listens.
Drag your finger. Pull the handle. That's the training.
Bend-Shot is field-tested by Bel Air Mechanical crews on live commercial work. These are our jobs — nothing staged.
You're standing at the wall looking at the actual obstruction — not a drawing from somebody's office.
No tape-off-the-last-bend. One reference, every mark, so the errors don't stack down the stick.
The bend that's figured right doesn't join the pile. That pile is money you already spent.
Change order? You've got the sticks, couplings, straps and connectors counted before you pack up.
Every length can be typed in off the tape. The laser just means you're not writing numbers on your hand up a ladder.
The runs where a tape needs two people and still sags are the runs where the laser pays for itself.
Shoot it and it goes on the leg you're pointing at. No transcription, no "was that 14-7 or 14-1?"
Tight spaces, dirty glass, bright sun. Type it in and move on — the app doesn't care where the number came from.
Every shop has one. The guy who looks at a wall and just knows — where the mark goes, how much that shoe takes up, how much the bend is going to gain, which way the pipe is going to spring back when he lets off.
He learned it over forty years, mostly from someone else who never wrote it down either. Now he's retiring — and unless somebody catches it, all of it leaves with him.
Meanwhile the new guy gets a bender, a stick, and "figure it out." He's not lazy. Nobody ever taught him. That gap is what fills the scrap pile, blows the material budget, and runs off the good young hands who quit because they felt stupid.
Take-up by shoe and size, gain by angle, springback by material, real conduit dimensions. Not guesses. If a number isn't published for your bender, it says VERIFY instead of pretending.
It flags the stick that's too short for the bends you've asked for before he marks it. The save happens at the bender, not at the scrap pile.
Mark, angle, take-up, gain — printed next to the piece. The apprentice learns the arithmetic while he uses it, and that's how it actually sticks.
The bending knowledge of a forty-year hand, in every pocket on the crew, on every job, forever. That's the whole point.
None of this was ever a secret. It's just what needs to be taught — and nobody ever wrote it down. So we did, and we're giving it away. We're not holding the trade hostage behind a paywall. The app is the product. The knowledge belongs to the trade — hand it to your apprentice on day one, print the whole thing and hang it in the trailer.
Two tracks. Every box reads itself out loud if you'd rather listen than read.
Learn the app in an afternoon.
The trade behind the buttons. Hand this to every apprentice on day one.
The 45 offset: two 45° bends get you around something. The distance between the two marks is the offset height × 1.414 — a 6" offset needs the marks 8-1/2" apart, a 10" offset needs 14-1/8". That constant is just 1 ÷ sin 45°, and every offset angle has its own: shallower angles need the marks farther apart, steeper ones closer together.
Then the part that gets skipped: the bend itself changes the length of the run. Take-up is how far back from your mark the bend actually starts — it's a property of the shoe and the size, and it's why you subtract before you mark. Gain is the length the bend gives back, because the pipe travels the curve instead of the corner. Ignore gain and your run comes out long, every time, in the same direction.
That's one paragraph out of twenty modules. All of it free.
No login. No email. Print it and hang it in the trailer.
It's funny because it's true, and it's true because we've all lived it. Every laugh has a lesson hiding in it — that's how the trade trains the new guy, and it's how we built the app.
Don't like reading? Neither do we. Hit 🔊 LISTEN on any box and it reads that one out loud.
Nobody ever quit the trade over a hard day — they quit over being lost and too proud to say so. Humor is how crews teach without anyone admitting they're learning. That's the product too. Bend-Shot tells you the truth about the math and never makes you feel stupid for asking.
The full bend and takeoff engine, laser link, cut-and-bend lists, and the complete training library. Same price for a one-man shop or a hundred hands — no tiers, no corporate discount.
START MY 2 WEEKS FREE2 weeks free, then $59/mo per seat. Cancel anytime.
Step-by-step how-to videos plus Foreman School — take-up, gain and shrink, springback, offsets and saddles, supports, ordering in sticks. Unlocked the minute you sign up.
Short two sticks but there's a box of factory 90s on the truck? Drop them in the Bucket. The takeoff re-does itself — a factory 90 and a bend you make don't measure the same, so the app changes the numbers, not you.
Swap a field bend for a factory ell — or the other way round — and the marks, the cut lengths and the count all re-figure off the swap.
Tell it what you've actually got — sticks, couplings, ells, straps — and it builds the run around your stock before it writes an order.
The drops and short pieces in the corner are money you already spent. Put them in the Bucket and let the layout use them.
Order the difference, not the whole list. What you already own comes off the count.
One trip. The fitting you already own is the cheapest one on the job.
Bend-Shot is field-proven by Bel Air Mechanical crews on real commercial work. Drop your email and your two weeks start the day we open the doors.