Wire Drawing

Our fifth project was to create a drawing out of mostly wire. Other objects could be used, but the focus was supposed to be on wire. We went to a scrap yard to find old wire and other objects to use, but at that time I had no idea what I was going to do. This was actually one of the most difficult projects for me to design. I was completely at a loss up until two days from it being due! Then I decided to look through my old sketches to get inspiration. When I saw this design, it kind of clicked what to do.

I made some changes to the design, such as making the spheres be crumpled balls of copper wire, and the octagon would have grey-ish silver wire wrapped all the way around it through the hole in the center.

I had to figure out a way to make the frame of the octagon sturdy enough to support the weight of the wire and toyed with a number of ideas before deciding that I would just have to cut two planes out of plywood and separate them with dowel rods. I looked up a geometric way to draw out perfect octagons and drew two concentric ones on a sheet of plywood. To make cutting them out faster, I clamped another sheet to this one and made both cuts at the same time.

I was left with this after a couple hours of my first time using both a circular saw and jigsaw. It was a pretty unpleasant experience because saw dust kept getting behind my safety glasses. Some safety glass, right? Fortunately, though, I managed to cut them out quite well if I may say so. I then drilled holes for the dowel rod spacers that I was going to put in.

With the spacers in place the whole thing was beginning to come together. It stood up just as I wanted it to, so now all that was left was to wrap it in wire...

I vastly underestimated the amount of time and effort it would be to wrap that much wire around this type of structure. I had bought a quarter-mile of electric fence wire and fully planned to use it all, but my arms gave out about half way through the roll. It took me at the very least 4-5 hours to go from bare wood to the picture on the bottom right.

Unfortunately, as you can see, the wire isn't wrapped densely enough to completely cover the wood like I had hoped, but as I said, my arms were done. I then began working with the copper wire to make the crumpled balls of wire. I had a few different shades of the copper and made the string through the opening sort of gradate from very shiny bright copper on the ends to a dull, corroded kind in the center.

I made yet another mistake with my design planning at this point, as the wire spheres were also nowhere near as dense as I wanted them to be. Also, whereas in the design they were meant to arch through the center of the octagon, in the final product they merely laid through it with out support. However, it was already approaching 5 am and I had to make do. I ended up skipping my first class to sleep.

Here's a picture of the final product. I am definitely displeased with it, but that's what I get for inadvertently waiting so long to get started.