How *I* twist wire

As promised, I am attempting to do a little show and tell on how I twist wire. First and most importantly, I use an electric drill and a fly tying vise (the fly tying vise I have is one that can be anchored to the side of a table or desk - similar ones can be found here, or at most any fishing/tackle store) - both of which make this SO easy to do! First thing to do is assemble all the things you will need to do this:

drill, cutters, pliers, 3pieces of 20 gauge wire and vise

put a bend in one end of the wire and feed into drill; tighten (use the chuck if necessay to make sure it's TIGHT) so wire doesn't pull out.

make a bend in the other end (similar to the first bend I made on the other end that is now in the drill - picture just didn't come out)

put end into the vise making sure it is tightend so wire cannot slip out


make sure drill is in forward (tried to twist in reverse once but that yielded a really ugly result) and turn on drill - slowly at first.


this is the finished twisted wire.

In this example you can see a few bumps in the finished piece - those happened because the lengths of wire I used were not exactly the same length - just make sure once you have the wire in the drill and tightened in the vise the wires you are working with are all close to the same length. I also made the bends in the wire much longer than normal for the illustration purposes.

Hope this is helpful and please let me know if you have any questions.