I’m making oval links and cannot find many round pattern wire sources. The twisted square is all I can find. Does anyone know of any please? Or do you know of any tooling for rolling mill or similar to make round pattern wire? It needs to have some texture so twisting and soldering doesn’t seem feasible for the length I have to make–32 inches of 2.5mm long links.
Thanks.
Jennifer
Hi,
would you consider ready made chain (by the inch/ foot)…?
julie
I twist and solder a lot of 18 and 16 gauge round wire. If you are careful, you can almost completely hide the joint by small twists of the ends once you get them lined up to solder. They would probably also cut on a jump ringer. but then I have had them be more trouble than they are worth depending on the size of the wire. They can be textured one at a time with a small rounded hammer or a dull set of wire cutters. Julie’s suggestion of just buying a chain is a good idea. There are many good chain suppliers out there. Look at Halstead Bead and Blake Brothers to start. Good luck…Rob
Sorry, I just realized that you are looking for 18K. I don’t think that Halstead and Blake Brothers do gold. There are many who do…Rob
If the links are to be 2.5mm long then the maximum diameter of the wire will be 0.6mm. I don’t think anyone makes patterned wire of any kind that thin. 1mm is the thinnest patterned wire I’ve ever seen in anyone’s catalog.
Your best bet is to twist up your own wire. At that small diameter, and short length for each link, you needn’t worry about completely soldering the links. They really won’t come apart once the chain is made.
With just a bit of experimentation you should be able to make a mandrel if a size that will nicely align the twists as you wrap the coil.
If you have the capability to make your own wire, there’s plenty of ways to make interesting patterns with your wire by combining different shapes, sizes, and using different colors together, for example combining I/2 round and round and pulling them through a draw plate. You can pull the wire to very small sizes, but with 2.5mm links, most of the detail will be hard to make out. Sometimes removing a wire after twisting can leave a very interesting pattern in the wire that remains.
The first two pictures show some of my experiments; the first is in silver with different size and shape combined, the second picture shows rose and white gold together. I kept these to remind myself of what I did and weren’t for sale.
In this picture, part of the twisted wire was removed in the pendant.
A finished piece using 18K yellow and 18K peach combined for the border accent.
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