I understood that Ryan was making his own copper wire, or asking someone to make it. If there is some craft-way in the process, it would be interesting to see how it is made, how Ryan obtained the quality he wanted (some guests like Jan Culek was impressed by the wire quality), how he tested, the process (except if it is in a factory maker), etc.
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I’m guessing he is annealing in a kiln somehow, or in a very controlled temperature environment. I’ve been dabbing into annealing my own and it’s quite a simple process and if you managed to control the temperatures you could make perfectly annealed wire
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Call me a dummy, but I feel like I had pretty good success annealing my wire at home. Knowing that the crystalline structure of the copper changes at high heat, I simply got a good hot fire going in the fireplace and put the coiled wire in there for some time. This was just run of the mill wire that I sourced from a local hardware store and home depot, you can buy copper wire by the foot fairly cheap.
I’m sure it could be slightly softer, but I’ve found it to be easy to work with and holding all the bends. I’d love to know if I’m missing out on a more refined process if there were any.
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Yes, thats one route to go about it, it is indeed a pretty easy process to achieve at home, what I found really interesting about the wire being used at Mirai is how little oxidation it shows, Ive tried it in different ways so far and the best results have been achieved heating the wire with a propane gas burner at high pressure and a torch to heat both from the top and bottom, then quenching to get rid of the oxidation (I don’t own a kiln to try some more controlled scenarios) but in all my tests, specially when using a wood fire to heat the wire the oxidation is very much present, not at all like the wires they have at Mirai so they are somehow reducing that oxidation significantly and from what I understand quenching gets rid of a lot of it.
The other reason for high oxidation on the wire is from using oxygen rich heat sources, but thats the one thing I can see that is really impressive in their wire.
Annealing wire is indeed pretty simple. When I first started doing it I would load it up into my kiln, bring it up to temp, let it soak in the heat for 30 min then quench. There was a ton of oxidization that did not come off through quenching. I then experimented with temp and duration. The best formula I I have found is to bring up to 915 degrees, then load the wire. I let it soak for 10-30 min depending on the gauge. I quench the wire as fast as I possibly can to cause the oxidization to be blasted off the surface.
Seems like any more time or any higher temp just makes the oxidization worse with no perceivable increase in softness.
An early attempt at 4 gauge.
Wire annealed at 915 for controlled time.
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