DIY Wire Bender

Inspired by This awesome DIWire-Bender Instructables I thought one of these would be cool to have around, for the purposes of making cool things with wire.

The company that seems to have helped with these instructions actually sell a commercial version of this now (via a kickstarter), they also include a gallery of "Bendables" showing the types of things you can do. For myself, I thought it might be cool to make springs of various sizes, perhaps custom cages for various applications. Actually, I think perhaps one of the genesis for this was watching a cool video posted on reddit about how paperclips are made

The bill of materials on the DIWire bender instructibles had some pretty intimidating stepper motors that seemed a little out of the desired price range for a hobby machine, so as a compromise I decided to grab the highest N-cm torque stepper motors that Creatron stocked, hoping that those will do the job (actually, it may just mean that we have a limitation on the amount / width of wire we can bend). Who knows, we'll see how it goes.

For now, here's the details:

What we have

• Stepper motors
• some low voltage stepper motor drivers, hubs, and screws
• a few linear actuators (not sure if they fit the bill, but worth a shot)
• Arduino uno controller
• 3D printed files from the Bill of materials for the instructable

What we need

• Remaining miscellaneous parts from the bill of materials
• Some clue as to how to assemble the various bits together. Likely some sturdy material / wood for the base that the wire bender would anchor to
• Most importantly: Your help!

This is a project I'd love to see happen, but I'm not sure how much I can be around for the whole thing, so I figured I would post it on the public wiki on the off chance some others may be interested in helping out. Perhaps we can keep track either directly on this page or via the talk page

Progress to date

• Early 2015: Picked up bag of stuff from Creatron
• May 26: took the photo(below), created the wiki page.

Please feel free to update this, or let me know (on the e-mail list or directly) if you're interested!