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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 the industrial wire drawing process.

I have seen some DIY wire drawing machines and drawtables. They are all equally similar, perhaps one copied off another and another and this is fifth generation? They are not good for production purposes.

I took another approach entirely and got better results. I have talked with tool companies about manufacturing and selling it because it's simple and affordable. To protect my intellectual property I've removed the pictures.

Plastic pipe sections make up the drums that hold the wire. 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 a second drum through the guides and pulleys and into a cleaning and lubing attachment. It's pulled through the drawplate and secured to the first drum. Turn the handle until all the wire is drawn through, transfer the wire to the other drum, and repeat until finished.

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 draw bench.

The first version was proof of concept. However, judging usability based on dead-soft 0.50mm fine silver wire would be a grave mistake. The success encouraged further upgrades and modifications, earning the prototype-in-training label.

When it came time for some small wire - 0.40mm round sterling - it didn't play nice. 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. Thus, it'll need a makeover to accommodate extreme wire sizes.

It's a perfect alternative to commercial drawbenches: less costly; more compact and lighter, 2ft x 3ft tabletop footprint; makes better product in quicker time (flawlessly pulls 350ft of 1.0mm wire in one go, or 175ft of 2.0mm, etc.)!

I'm designing the updated version which will be leaps and bounds better now that I have identified and solved a handful of issues. I made another drawbench for the heavy stuff. It rivals any commercial or DIY version 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.

Posted by M: July 31, 2020

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