Ray Behner's advice is also my first question, and recently a friend asked me to straighten a hitch cylinder rod on his Kabota tractor.
The tractor is new, and he wasn't sure how it got bent, I straightened it within .004" and sent it back. It got bent again almost immediately!
It seems the distributor assembled the cylinder with the yoke upside down, so that when the cylinder was retracted it automatically bent the rod as it came home. My friend finally saw in the parts drawings that it was assembled wrong and they gave him a new one after some arguing.
With the yoke the correct way up it has built in clearance, but backwards it's just the opposite.
But I've straightened many piston rods up to 3" diameter over the years.
BTW, I finally "Saw" in my mind the best way to do that in the press, a dial indicator holder that hangs between the channel irons that hold the platens so that (Set first to zero against the bottom of the bent rod) as the ram applies pressure I can actually see the bend come down as decimal inch measurment, the pre press runout having been determined in the lathe.
By this means I hope to watch it come down exactly 1/2 of TIR and release the pressure to watch what the amount of spring back is.
Next press it again, only this time add the spring back value to it, that should settle back to very near straight.
Perhaps another check in the lathe then and go from there. I'm convinced that it will save a lot of time.
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