I’ve looked in the archives for an answer to this question and only found references to books showing how the ancients made beaded wire. The vast majority of the books cited are out of print and insanely expensive. And honestly I wanted to know how beaded wire is made in today’s world. Do any of you make your own beaded wire? In the archives, someone mentioned having dies they used to make beaded wire. Every time I Google it, no matter how I arrange the keywords, all I get is a bunch of hits on how to use beading wire to string beads! headdesk Beaded wire can’t be that difficult to make, it’s common, surely there are smiths out there who make their own beaded wire? Is there a place you can buy dies to make your own beaded wire? Or do you have to make the dies yourself? Would you mind posting pictures of your beaded wire dies if you have some? How do they do that?? I would be happy to make my own dies if necessary, but I don’t know what beaded wire dies look like or how they’re designed or how they’re used to get that full round beaded wire look. Surely there’s someone who sells beaded wire dies because beaded wire is so common, right?
Hi,
my brain is telling me it would probably be pattern wire rollers fir a rolling mill…possibly only possessed by pattern wire companies…
you could try asking Kevin Potter, of Potter USA . He bought equipment from a pattern wire comoany that closed…Cranston Fancy Wire Company, I believe…try googling both…instagram shows some of the machinery…probably a similar concept…also try googling pattern wire rolling mill…google images, youtube, etc…
this set of wire rollers fir an economy mill looks lije it has beaded wire on the top row…
i assume the quality of the rollers determines how nicely the wire comes out…in terms of flashing, round ess, etc…
Which isn’t beaded wire. That’s more like a flat strip of metal with a beaded texture down the middle on one side. Know what I mean? I’m baffled by this. I read some of the stuff in the archives that I could find, someone mentioned having made their own beaded wire die, but I couldn’t picture what it looked like or how it worked based off of their description of it. It can’t be that hard. I think the Romans used beaded wire and so did the Celts. Surely there’s a way to do this.
I just took a tour of Kevin Potter’s website and didn’t find anything. He would be a good person to ask and he, or his staff, can be easily reached, at least electronically. I follow his FB group and that might be the place to ask. My guess is that they are rolled in some way. Flashing might be a problem. I second the question: Why not just buy it?" But also figure out how it is made, otherwise the question will haunt me all day and I won’t get anything else done. Good luck…Rob
I own one of those economy rolling mills with replaceable texture rollers. I really love it, but for me it’s a very special purpose mill. It has numerous limitations. It’s not very strong and doesn’t open very far, just about 2 mm. (instead of 5-6 mm like most mills)
I bought it to texture sheet metal instead of roller printing. I bought a number of polished flat rollers and created my own custom textures rollers with grinding wheels, diamond cut off wheels & burs. It works great for what I use it for and is super cool!
Like others have said, you could make beaded wire with that mill, but it wouldn’t be perfect.
I get a lot of students who want to make rings with beaded wire, but all of the premade beaded wire that I’ve ever found is designed to work as bezel border and to be soldered on the sheet metal base plate. It breaks easily and isn’t designed to stand alone. I buy beaded wire from Rio Grande. Maybe there’s a source out there with stronger beaded wire, but again, I’ve never found one.
When I bought my economy rolling mill with replaceable texture rollers I thought it was such a fantastic idea that I reached out to Pepe to see if they could design something stronger and of a higher quality. They said the machining would be too expensive.
I hope that helps! And if anyone knows a good source of strong beaded wire please let me know.
Rio does sell a bead wire with larger joins between beads. It is the 10091x series. e.g., 100912, 2.06mm. The “regular” bead wire is the 10152x series.
– alonzo
Hi,
it would depend on whether there was a bead wire roller was on the top and bottom…which would create a bead pattern on both sides, or if the bottom roller was flat, creating a beaded pattern only on one side…
Hi,
to understand how a beaded look can be created by hand, yoh could look up how to make beaded ring shanks…using saw blades , triangular, and barrette escapement files…
There is a type of tool that is narrow and has a recessed, highly polished channel in it that is used for forming each bead. There’s a guy on YouTube, who shows how to make one. He does a lot of very old techniques and doesn’t use a lot of explanation, but his visual stuff is very good.
…am i correct in my observation that all the steps prior to actually forming the beads on the wire (while placed upon the music CD) , was to prepare the knife-like tool…to be used as a knife edged file/ burnisher…?
…it seems like the tool compresses the notch down, and then he tilts it to burmish/ round off one side of the bead…?
Julie,
Yes, it looks like all the steps prior to using the tool on the Wire, was to first cut the rounded groove into the knife’s edge and then once cut, to polish the groove…
To me it looks like the knife’s edge groove both cuts into and then burnishes down the wire into a bead, I didn’t see him tilt the tool at all, I think that since the steel in the knife is so much harder than the Silver, it does both beautifully at the same time! Very time consuming process I expect, but it does create a lovely Beaded Wire! Interesting Techniques, I will definitely be watching more of his videos, thank you for sharing Jennifer!
Jonathan
TIP: If you keep twisting twisted wire very, very, very tight, it looks like beads. You have to keep going until the lines between the two wires go from being diagonal to being perpendicular.
Janet…Thanks for pointing that out. I use a lot of tightly twisted wire for that very reason. I can also make it myself and not have to buy it. I watched the video that was posted and, while interesting, I can think of better ways to spend my time. I think that it would also be challenging to keep the wire straight enough, in the lengths needed, to allow it to roll. Maybe I am missing something…Rob
Maybe there are two sets of identical rollers oriented 90 degrees apart from each other. As the wire is pulled through, it gets rolled into a ball shape in both orientations. Just a thought…Rob
All right so I did a ton of research and digging and I found an article about how they tried to recreate the tools the ancients used to make beaded wire. One method is similar to the knife technique that guy uses in the video. It requires two iron knives. One has a U shape and is permanently fixed in a board with the U side up. That’s the auxiliary knife. The working knife gradually increases in width and is double-sided. One side has a U cross section and the other one has a V cross section. Basically you move the wire along the auxiliary knife perpendicularly and use the working knife to push out the grooves in the beaded wire first starting with the V side then moving to the U side and it slowly pushes up the metal in between the grooves until beads form. The other method used two iron or steel blocks with U grooves cut in it. Kind of like swage blocks except there are two, a top and a bottom, and they have to fit each other and you turn the wire as you push these blocks down and squeeze the wire. The knife method allows you greater flexibility in using different diameter wire. The block method is faster but you would have to have a different block for each gauge of wire you want to make. I don’t know much about making my own tools… but I’m considering making these knives and dies so I can make my own beaded wire. I need to learn how to work with steel in order to do this. After working with gold and silver, steel drives me nuts because it takes forever to do anything with because it’s so much harder. Apparently I’m impatient. How in the world do they make beaded wire for mass production, though? Do they just cast it?
