Checked against primary sources 2026-09-04

Hands-On Electrician Labs: Bend, Wire and Build

Four things you drag, turn and connect, and they answer back. Bend a stick of EMT and read the marks. Wire a three way and flip it until the light behaves. Drop conductors in a box until it runs out of room. Put electrodes in the ground and tie them into one system. All four are free, and none of them asks for an account.

Then take it to the questions: 30 free, timed

• BendConduit Bending Simulator: Offsets, Saddles and 90s

  Conduit bending simulator for EMT: drag the rise and turn the angle dial, and the multiplier, the shrink, the take up and every mark move with it.

  What you drag. Drag the round handle to set the rise, the stub height or the size of the obstruction, then turn the dial to 10, 22.5, 30, 45 or 60 degrees.

  What it teaches. 358.24(A) for how a field bend is made and where its radius comes from, 358.24(B) for the 360 degrees of bend between pull points, and Chapter 9 Table 2 by name.

  Open the lab

• Wire3-Way and 4-Way Switch Wiring Lab: Drag the Wires

  3-way and 4-way switch wiring lab: drag conductor ends onto terminals, flip the switches, and a checker names the 2026 NEC section behind each fault.

  What you drag. Drag a conductor end onto a screw, or pick the terminal off the list under the drawing, then tap a switch to flip it and walk every combination.

  What it teaches. 406.30(A) for switching in the ungrounded conductors, 406.30(C) for the grounded conductor at the switch box, 200.8(C) and 310.6(A)(3) for a white used as a hot, and 406.40(B) for grounding the switch.

  Open the lab

• FillBox Fill Lab: Drop Conductors in a Box and Watch It Fill

  Box fill lab: drag conductors, grounds, a device yoke, clamps and fittings into a drawn box and watch it fill, with the NEC 314.16(B) rule on every drop.

  What you drag. Drag a conductor, a ground, a device yoke, a clamp or a support fitting out of the tray and let go inside the box. The buttons do the same thing without a drag.

  What it teaches. 314.16(A) for the volume you have against 314.16(B) for the fill you calculate, and each of the parts of 314.16(B) that counts a conductor, a clamp, a fitting, a yoke or a ground.

  Open the lab

• GroundGrounding Electrode System Lab: Build It, Bond It, Size the GEC

  Drag grounding electrodes into the ground, bond them into one system, and size the grounding electrode conductor from Table 250.66 and its ceilings.

  What you drag. Drag electrodes into the ground under a drawn house, then drag from the panel to an electrode for the conductor and from electrode to electrode for the bonding jumpers.

  What it teaches. 250.50 for bonding every electrode present into one system, 250.52 for what qualifies and on what condition, 250.53 for the supplemental electrode and the 25 ohm sentence, and 250.66 with 250.68 for sizing and the connection.

  Open the lab

Why doing it beats reading it

The paper is open book and it is scored against a clock. So the thing that costs you is not whether you have read a rule, it is how long you take to work out which rule you are looking at and what it does to the number in front of you.

A rule you have only read is a sentence you have to rebuild in the room. A rule you have built once is a picture you can check an answer against. When a question says eight 12 AWG grounding conductors enter the box, you either remember the counting rule or you remember the line the lab wrote when you dropped the fifth one in.

These labs will not tell you how you are going to do, and nothing here predicts a result. What they do is put a wrong answer in front of you while it is cheap. Wire the supply onto a traveler screw and the light still works from one switch, which is exactly the trap that reads as correct on paper.

What to do after a lab: the six games and the eight calculators

A lab shows you the mechanism. The games make finding it fast, and the calculators make the arithmetic routine. Both are free.

The six games. Ampacity sprint runs Table 310.16 against the clock. Wire size sprint runs the same table in reverse, from a load to the smallest conductor. Code navigation race gives you an exam-worded prompt and asks for the chapter, the article or the section. Definitions flashcards holds 60 Article 100 terms with a spaced repetition queue. Which table? gives you a job and four tables and asks which one you open. Grounding, bonding, or both hands you twenty-four items and three buckets, and four of them belong in both.

The eight calculators. Box fill and conduit fill are the two counting problems. Wire size and ampacity are the derating chain from both ends. Voltage drop runs both methods and can size a conductor to a percent you name. Motor and transformer cover the two calculation families that carry their own rounding rules. Ohm's law takes any two of volts, amps, ohms and watts and gives you the other two.

When you want the method behind a lab in prose, three pages carry it: conduit bending math, 3-way switch wiring and 4-way switch wiring.

Questions people ask

What is a lab on this site?

It is a page you work rather than read. You drag something, turn something or connect something, and the page answers with the number it just changed and the code section that governs it. There are four of them, they run in the browser, and none of them asks you to sign in.

Do the labs work on a phone?

Yes. Every drag has a button or a list beside it that does the same job, so a small screen and a keyboard both work without dragging. The drawings scale down and the reading panel stacks under them.

Do I need an account or an email address?

No. The four labs are free end to end, nothing is held back behind a form, and no address is asked for or stored. Anything a lab remembers, such as a best score, sits in your own browser.

Are the bending constants from a real bender?

They are read from published bender guides and product pages, named in the comment at the head of the simulator: the Klein Tools conduit bender and Angle Setter guide, the Klein product pages that print the stub-up height for each head, and the Greenlee hand bender instructions. Read the take up stamped on your own bender before you trust a mark, because a bender with different numbers on it is telling you the truth about itself.

Is this the style the exam asks questions in?

No, and that is deliberate. The exam asks in words and expects you to find the rule in your own book, while a lab shows you the thing the words describe so the rule has somewhere to sit. Work a lab, then take the questions, which are written in the exam's wording.

Can I use these for the Michigan exam?

Yes. The Michigan labs are the same labs, written against the 2026 edition like these, with a box on each page giving the 2023 number where one moved. Michigan tests open book on the 2023 NEC, so read that box before you trust a number. They are at michiganelectricianexam.com/labs.