Stud.io is generally an amazing piece of free software, but some of its features have room for improvement.
The flex feature is ok for some stuff, but when you need your tubes, strings, etc. to bend in a specific way, it can be maddeningly bad!
This is my technique for bending flexible pieces. I prefer to use Mechabricks, which is free, browser-based, and pretty user-friendly once you get used to the slightly different interface.
