Just hit 5000 feet of EMT bent without a single dogleg

Been running conduit in a warehouse for the past 3 weeks and realized I haven't screwed up a bend since my second day on the job. Got a little celebration from the foreman when I told him, felt pretty good. How many feet do you guys usually go before you mess one up?

3 comments

3 Comments

coleman.gray1mo agoTop Commenter

I mean 5000 feet is impressive but technically you can't bend EMT at 5000 feet without a coupling.

drew_reed621mo ago

Actually @coleman.gray, there's something off about that take. You CAN bend EMT at 5000 feet in the sense of total footage installed, but the way you said it makes it sound like you're talking about one continuous run. Nobody is bending a single 5000 foot piece of pipe without couplings. That's just not how conduit work goes. The whole discussion is about total footage on a job, not one unbroken stretch. Tara_patel has it right - it's about the quality of the bends over the total work done. So yeah, you're technically correct that a coupling would be needed at some point, but that's not really the point anyone was trying to make.

tara_patel1mo ago

My cousin's been running conduit for 15 years and he says 5000 feet is barely a warm-up. He's hit 8000 feet on a hospital job before he had to unkink a piece from a bad offset. The whole "5000 feet" thing is just a number - what matters is the bends themselves, not the total footage. I'd rather see someone nail 1000 feet of perfectly bent pipe than go 5000 with a bunch of ugly bends that barely pass. And that coupling comment from coleman.gray is just stupid, like we're talking literal feet of pipe laid end to end, not a single continuous run.