Tools for Wire Sculpting

Video Transcript

"DEB HUGLIN VOGEL: Hi, I'm Debbie "The Roboteer." And I'm here today for Expert Village at SDAI: Museum of the Living Artist in San Diego, and we're going to talk about making wire sculptures. Now to make wire sculptures, you need some specialized tools that you can work with the wire because it's kinda thick and you need the tools to be able to cut it and bend it. Cutting tools are like this where they have a little edge on them and you can cut through the wire just like this. And it just snips it right off. We've got a number of different tools here. Some of them are strictly to make decorative moves. So this one is a square-nose plier and it pretty much makes square bends so I can make very interesting bends. This one's a needle-nose plier that's very long, and if I have to reach inside something, I can get a hold of it and still turn it. Old pliers are just as good as the new ones. Sometimes when they're really hideous, they might actually be better pliers in the end because they've been around the block. So these are nice needle-nose pliers as well. This happened to have a spring on them. And if you want to be able to not have to work too hard about opening and closing them, you might want a pair with springs in them. But you do need some cutters to work with the wire, and these are actually tin snips so you can work on a very big wire or pieces of metal with that. And we use other tools for specialized things like this one. It's to wrap the wire, and you get cork screws. So the sky is the limit on what you can use for tools."