Only interesting conversation Chuck, no big deal stuff. If that 180* were forged. I thought I'd see much more distortion like compression on the inside and stretching on the outside of the bend. It might be very difficult to maintain the same thickness of material around that bend.
Maybe, the loss of grain flow around the 180* could be made up for by using a known alloy steel and modern heat treat practices. Agreed, traditionally I'd think bends, curves and likely tapers were all rough forged to get it close and probably more sound. I think a couple more pictures downstream in the process would be interesting to see.
