Enter a rotary-draw part as feed / rotate / bend (YBC) steps, then walk through it one bend at a time to see exactly how the plane-of-bend rotates at each stage — the part that gets hard to picture in your head after the third bend.
Y = straight fed before the bend (mm). B = rotation of the bend plane. Dir = clockwise / counter-clockwise. C = bend angle. All bends use the bend radius above.
The hardest part of a multi-bend tube to picture in your head is not the bend angles — it is how the plane of each bend rotates relative to the last. After the third bend, the part twists out of any single plane and becomes genuinely difficult to visualise from a coordinate table alone. This visualizer walks the rotary-draw machine cycle one motion at a time so you can see exactly where each bend ends up before you cut tube.
A rotary-draw bender repeats three motions for every bend. Feed (Y): the tube advances by the straight length before the bend. Rotate (B): the tube rolls about its own axis so the coming bend falls in the right plane — this is the plane-of-bend rotation, and it is what makes a part three-dimensional. Bend (C): the die wraps the tube through the bend angle. Stepping through these in order, bend by bend, is the only reliable way to build an intuition for how rotation values map to a finished shape.
Each rotation is applied relative to the tube's current orientation, not a fixed world frame. That means rotations compound: the plane of the fourth bend depends on the sum of every rotation before it. A part with all bends in one plane needs zero rotations; introduce a single non-zero rotation and everything downstream tilts with it. Seeing this accumulate visually — rather than reading it off a YBC table — is what prevents the classic setup error of a part that is geometrically correct bend-by-bend but points the wrong way overall.
The visualizer takes the same feed/rotate/bend data a machine runs. To generate that data from CAD centreline coordinates, use the XYZ–to–YBC converter; to get the raw-tube cut length for the same part, use the tube bend calculator.