We were able to bend the framerails out of single, continuous lengths of tube by starting in the middle, working our way out to one end, then reversing the tube in the machine and starting in the middle again. Once you make a bend on the mandrel bender, you can't reinsert the mandrel, so we needed to have our bend locations, angles and springback planned out exactly, otherwise we'd need to start from scratch with a new length of tube (this is different from a regular rotary die bender or a shoe-type bender, where you can re-bend to add degrees if necessary). Our Baliegh/RMD MB-350 has a 9 ft-long mandrel table and each of the long lower framerails started out 16 ft long. We chose to use our mandrel bender because it securely clamps the tube in place, allowing us to get dead-nuts accuracy on our bend rotations and angles. One of our commercial customers is building a prototype hybrid car and recently hired us to bend and notch a bunch of frame tubes from 1.625'x.083' chrom-moly. Once you get past the price of the equipment, a mandrel bender can let you do some really neat stuff.
