Types of Wire for Wire Sculpting

Video Transcript

I’m Mark Kooy here with Expert Village and we’re going to be talking about wire sculpture and braising techniques and tools. All right, to begin with as we look at doing our wire sculpture, we need to talk about some of the different kinds of wires that you might want to use. One of the popular ones that um, that I like to use is copper wire, right now in today’s prices it’s a little spendy and if you’re just starting out or what I like to as I begin I use just regular steel wire to be able to do a lot of my casts or 3-dimensional types of sketches before I go and spend the money on copper wire. You can go to your hardware store and you can get all different kinds of gauges, and wire is measured in gauges, not in inches or parts of inches. So you’ll find that you’ll be getting like 12-gauge or 10-gauge or different sizes of wire. Uh, the one thing you do want to watch out for, it’s not impossible to work with this, but if you find shinny wire like this its galvanized, usually, unless it’s stainless, and then you’re just; you’re dealing with some other issues. But the galvanized wire, when you heat it up with the torch is going to put off some fumes that could make you sick, not permanently but you, its kinda like having a bad hangover. So you don’t really want that. So, what I suggest for beginning and for doing your test runs and figuring out maybe what you’re trying to accomplish, is just plain, mild steel wire, you can get it at the hardware store, a lot of times its by the concrete, they use it in doing cement work, it does come with an oil on it, which will burn off. But those are the basic kinds of wires that are kinda fun to work with and I find that the mild steel has a lot of different capabilities and gives you a variety of things that you can do.

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