Bending tubes without a tube bender

Heatpipes are rarely straight, that's why I had to find a way to bend my brass tubes. Bending a tube is not hard, you just put it over your knee and voila. Of course that would also put a huge kink in the tube and it could no longer be used for a heatpipe. The corners in a heatpipe need a nice curve because when the working fluid vaporizes it has to travel along the tube with minimal restriction, kinks and sharp corners are not good. To make nice bends in tube you need a tube bender. I did not have a tube bender and they're not available locally, buying one online would take ages to ship, especially considering it's xmas season. My only option was to DIY a tube bender, which is exactly what I did. I started out by going to my local hardware store and buying myself a pulley block and steel thimbles.

My plan was to use these as my dies to bend my tube around. My first try was with the steel thimble since it was easy to clamp the tube to it. In order to not waste any tube I tried bending the heatpipe that I had previously made. As soon as I started rolling the tube onto the tackle it immediately buckled. At first I thought I didn't bend it right so I tried again from the other end.....and it buckled again. I then noticed that the thimble didn't have enough support on the sides of the tube, which would cause the tube to kink.

The pulley should have a much better chance at keeping the tube from kinking since it fits around much better. The only problem is that the pulley is made of plastic and wouldn't hold the tube together too well. Fortunately the pulley is in a steel block and with a few scraps to fill the gap between the plastic pulley and the block I was ready to bend the tube.

I took a fresh bit of tube and started experimenting. First bend went better than with the steel thimble but still kinked. So I tried again with a little more care - same result. The brilliant idea of annealing the tube then came to mind. As expected after I annealed the tube with my butane torch it got much softer and easier to bend. Consequently the next bend turned out much better.

I then tried to anneal the tube better and bend it with more care. The bend turned out great with only the slightest evidence of a kink starting to form.

Seems like I can make a bend of about 3cm diameter with reasonable confidence. I then tried bending the tube to a much tighter radius but it quickly turned into a mess and you don't need to see it.
My next step was to improve the spacers I used in my tube bender because the ones I had in were messy and stuck out too much (My phone refused to save the pic of that for some reason).
A new piece of brass tube was then cut, well annealed and then bent into a 90.

The bend turned out well and compared to the heatpipe from an old Acer laptop looks to be around (cheeky pun) the same radius. The tube will be used in one of my upcoming projects. I say my tube bender turned out well, some improvements could be made but for now I think this is as good as it gets.
That's all for now, thanks for reading.