Barbed Wire
Hello everyone, it's Max here with another tutorial, I hope you like it. I read about a great way to make barbed wire, so I decided to try it out and make some of my own. (The original article can be found here, though the author there mentions that he isn't the originator either.) I used a copper wire about 0.2mm in diameter. This method works best if you don't use too long a wire at one time. I prefer to make about 1 meter at a time. Start by taking the wire and folding it in half. Loop one end onto something stationary, I prefer to use one of my tools to hold it in place. I also keep the pair of wires about 1/2cm apart to better see how they twist. Hook the other end of the wire into the chuck of a drill or whatever you want to use to rotate the wire. Once the wire is spun, you've got the "wire" part done. Now you just need the barbs.

For this step, you'll need a single wire to act as your spikes and a small tool to keep them spaced evenly. I find that a distance of 0.8-1cm is pretty good. You can achieve this by wrapping it around part of a pair of pliers or by making a little guide like I did here. The guide is a little piece of folded plastic. The fold keeps it on the wire and it is the right width for the spacing I want. Take the single wire and tightly wrap it around the main wire three times (so it starts on one side of the wire and comes out on the other side.) Then you loop the spike wire around your tool and wrap it 3 times again. Continue this process so that your loops zig zag all the way down the wire.

Now that you have it all together, it's time to make sure it doesn't come apart. You can either squeeze each spike with pliers or glue it. I'll cover both methods. If you are using pliers, be fairly gentle with your squeezing. Most pliers have textured areas to prevent slippage, but as malleable as this thin wire is, you'll need to hold your pliers at an angle to prevent them from crimping the wire too much. If you are gluing it, just put a drop or two of superglue on each spike. (Try not to glue it to the table, and remember that the drops of glue can be messy if you aren't careful.)

Now that your spikes are on the twisted wire and they are attached by glue or pressure, it's time to get rid of the loops. Simply cut off most of each loop, so there is a little spike sticking off in each direction on each barb. Yes, it seems wasteful to cut off that much wire. On the other hand, trying to do each one by hand would be wasteful of your time and probably your sanity. This is faster and you aren't likely to go crazy doing it. You now have a nice long, straight piece of barbed wire. Be careful, like real barbed wire it will be sharp, though with 0.2mm wire, it shouldn't cause too much damage. (If you use 0.5mm, that's a different story.)

Once you have the barbed wire, what do you do with it? Well, you've got several options. The first is to simply twist it up a bit haphazardly and stick it to bases and models or terrain. If you want to make it look more tidy, you can wrap the wire around a pen or paintbrush to make rolls like you see in security installations. You can also make fences out of it. If you straighten out a small paperclip, you can make three loops in it to guide the wire through and hold it up like a fencepost. You can also (for a lower-tech look) use chunks of sprue material as posts. Use a hobby knife (careful with that, kids, safety first) to carve one or two grooves around the top of the post, then wrap the wire around those grooves, gluing each piece as you finish it. If you are concerned that your barbed wire is too shiny, just dip it in a wash of black ink or heavily watered down Chaos Black. You could also try some watered-down reddish browns for a rusty effect, depending on exactly what you are looking for.

If you enjoyed this, email me and let me know

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