| How to bend piano wire.
Sounds a simple enough job to bend piano wire,but to do the job properly takes a little care,how many times have you made up that undercarriage that you just could not get into the shape that you wanted ? well here are a few tips to make life easier for you-
One of the biggest problems especially with the thicker gauge wire is to bend it accurately,to do this you will need a few one inch nails and a china graph pencil,say for example you are making a simple four point bend undercarriage from 8 swg wire,do a simple drawing on your workbench,where the bends go drive in some nails,so you should have four nails where the bends are intended.
Next take the piece of wire and mark the first bends which should co-incide with the upper ( middle ) portion of the undercarriage,use your chinagraph pencil to mark this and subsequent bends,now take the wire to your large vice and carefully place the wire into the jaws at the point of the first bend,take a piece of metal block and place it at the point of the bend,now strike this with a large hammer to ease the bend into place,keep striking until the required angle appears,do the same for the other side,now take the partially bent undercarriage over to your simple work top jig and mark the two lower bends where the wheels will fit,see how much easier it is to have a guide instead of doing the job blind ? next return to the vice,place between the jaws and strike again with the metal block and hammer.
All that you need to do now is finish off the ends with a dremel wheel by cutting a groove all the way around the thick wire,dont be tempted to snap the wire otherwise the extrusion will part company and be difficult to get back to the original state.
Never be tempted to heat up the wire as it is easy to destroy the tensile strength of the wire and it will break in service,just work the metal cold.
Piano wire is by definition an extruded material,true music wire is difficult if impossible to obtain these days,sadly a lot of wire now sold in model shops is not true piano wire.
__________________ 'And there I was oil on my goggles from a broken pipe,then I looked at the altimeter,all I could see was the makers name !' www.wonwinglo.scale-models.net/ | 
many thanx m8
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