Process: Circus line

We make our Circus line out of recycled electric wires. We have never paid for them, people have donated small amounts that aren’t worth refining, we have scrounged ourselves as well. (We are always looking for donations of wire!).

We strip the plastic coating from the wires, anneal them (heat them with a torch until the metal is soft), then draw them down with a draw plate to various dimensions (we mainly use four different dimensions of wire).

Electric wires after being skinned.

Wire being drawn through a draw plate.

After the wire is drawn down we form it into many many sizes of coils, which we hand cut for individual rings. The larger forms we solder closed right away, the smaller jump rings we solder closed when we construct our pieces.

coiled wire, redy to be cut for jump rings.

Formed wires and mandrel for forming.

jump rings

All of the discs we punch individually out of copper sheet using cutting discs.

Discs punched out of copper sheet.

We then start to construct our pieces. We solder the rings together flat, then add posts. The posts we use are now all surgical steel.

Pieces on a soldering block.

Posts after soldering.

Once everything is soldered we put all of our pieces in our tumbler, a cylinder filled with steel shot that turns. The shot hits the pieces over and over again burnishing the surface and hardening the pieces (copper is very soft after soldering).

Tumbler shot.

Soldered piece after tumbling.

Finally we powdercoat every piece. We hang the pieces from a piece of wire which is then charged. We connect a container of very fine powder to our powdercoating gun and attach the gun to compressed air. We shoot the pieces with the powder, the electric charge attrcts the powder and forms a uniform layer on the surface. The pieces are then cured in an oven to melt the plastic and form a durable layer of bright colour.

Powder.

Powdercoating gun, after spraying powder.

Pieces after being sprayed with powder curing in oven.

After that we assemble our pieces and they are ready to go! We offer powdercoating workshops in french and in english privately if you are interested in exploring this technique (or others we offer) contact us at studiomethode@gmail.com or take a look through our offered workshops here.