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Wire Drawing Machine

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The Wire Drawing Machine is ready. It's really cool. You put a bunch of wire or stuff that looks like wire (i.e. spaghetti, entrails, blurred time lapse photo of fireflies) in front of it and it draws an image for you. It can do color and black-and-white. There's a special Dali button for a surreal touch. I am expecting the patent to come through soon.

Naw, just kidding. It's a machine that makes wire.

Within a shop setting there are only so many metals that tolerate such treatment, mainly the precious metals, copper, and a few others. To make really good wire you have to mimic as much of the industrial wire drawing process as possible.

Everyone likes to think that everything they make is the bomb. Their DIY wire drawing machines are no exception except they are all equally similar, limited, and restrictive as the next. Where's the innovation?

I took another approach entirely and can confidently say mine is the best I've seen and used, not by a little, but by a landslide. I have talked with tool companies about manufacturing and selling it because it is a brilliant and unique idea. To protect my intellectual property I've removed the pictures so you'll have to imagine what it looks like.

For the two drums that hold the wire, plastic pipe sections were fitted with flush-mount plywood inserts. Add a 1/2" threaded rod for the axle and some pillow block bearings to spin smoothly. One drum is attached to the sled which glides easily on a linear bearing rail. This ensures the drum is centered over the drawplate hole to pull the wire straight.

Wire is fed from the free-standing drum through the guides and pulleys and into a cleaning and lubing attachment. It's pulled through the drawplate and secured to the collection drum whose crank and gear mechanism is a cannibalized trailer winch. Turn the handle until all the wire is drawn through, remove the wire and put it on the other drum, and repeat until finished. (Version 2.0 will have switchable drums and save lots of time and aggravation.)

It's white-glove clean and produces a near-perfect product consistently. The wire has no chance of twisting and there won't be grab marks every three or four feet like a conventional waste-of-money draw bench. Removing the wire to re-anneal is part of the loading process anyway so no time lost there.

The first version was proof of concept. However, judging future success on dead-soft 0.50mm fine silver wire would be a grave mistake. The success encouraged further upgrades and additional modifications, earning the prototype-in-training label. Meaning it will be a good starting point when I make the "real" one.

When it came time for some small wire - 0.40mm round sterling - it didn't play nice. I needed this to work efficiently on all sizes. One step is such a time toilet that it couldn't have been made more difficult even by design. Bizarre. Tiny wire is like quantum physics - the regular laws of nature don't apply.

It will need a makeover to accommodate really small wire as easily as large. Super-thick wire flexes the system enough that it would need reinforcement for best results but it still works. It's a perfect alternative to commercial drawbenches: cheaper; more compact and lighter (totally portable at 2ft x 3ft footprint and ~55lbs); makes a better product in quicker time (flawlessly pulls 350ft of 1.0mm wire in one go, or 175ft of 2.0mm, or 700ft of 0.50mm, etc.)!

I'm working on the new-and-improved version which will be leaps and bounds better now that I have identified all the areas for improvement and figured out solutions. I also made another drawbench for the heavy stuff. It, too, is better than any commercial or DIY version I have seen or used but pales in comparison to the one I describe here. Both of them fall somewhere between not-quite-pro and hobbyist-overkill in a landscape of unique equipment. What awesome tools!

Posted by M: July 31, 2020

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