The D.I.Wire Bender is a rapid prototype machine that bends metal wire to produce 2D or 3D shapes.
Wire unwinds from a spool, passes through a series of wheels to straighten, and then feeds through the bending head, which moves in 3 dimensions creating desired bends and curves. Vector files (e.g., Adobe Illustrator files), text files of commands (e.g., feed 50 mm, bend 90° to right…) provide DIWire’s instructions.

It’s essentially a 3D printer that describes lines, instead of volumes, in space, and it could be used for anything from prototypes to customized products.

Wire and rod forms come up often in our work, whether they are on furniture (chair legs models) or housewares projects (shower caddies) or even engineering parts (custom springs). Our 3D printer was ill-suited for this kind of prototype—it used more material for the scaffold than for the model itself, it was very slow, the max print volume was limiting, and the material was too weak for some thicknesses. Nor was modern CNC equipment helpful. CNC wire and rod benders have existed for many years, but only at the mass production level. That equipment doesn’t exist at model shops because it is cumbersome to program, expensive to own and it takes an expert to run. In our eyes, this was a hole in the market. We decided to create our own bender, with an interface that takes very little expertise to run, just like a 3D printer.

In recent years, we’ve been excited to see 3D printers spreading beyond businesses to individuals, with the aid of a little DIY ingenuity (e.g., Makerbots, RepRap, etc.). At the same time, there have been times when we’ve needed to prototype products that were lines in space rather than volumes. We wondered: would “regular” people have a use for a 3D wire bender? What would happen if benders were easily accessible? What would happen if instructions were sent remotely, so you could program it in one place and print it in another? We were inspired to hack together our own 3D wire bender using spare parts from our shop. The D.I.Wire Bender is the result.

As with all things new, it took study, testing, troubleshooting, and iteration to build the D.I.Wire Bender. In principle it’s not that difficult- hold the wire, push part of it to the right or left and, viola! Bent wire. In practice, you realize the limitations of DIY components. Arduino boards can only do one thing at a time, stepper motors have limited power, and going from just bending an angle to reading a vector made in Illustrator and bending a metal rod to match is another thing all together.

We ran many, many tests to troubleshoot problems…was the feed slipping? Why was the solenoid not firing? We wrote new programs specifically to test each feature separately, and we adjusted the plan to match the capabilities of what we had to work with and what would be reasonable for a piece of DIY equipment. Finally, it worked!

Our Bender is just taking its first baby-steps, but we envision a great future for it. It provides a new paradigm for 3D printing that didn’t exist in an accessible way before.

Its initial value could be for prototyping 2D & 3D objects in wire, ranging from items that are completely wire, to objects that serve as the frame for other materials to be stretched over (e.g., lamp shades or kites). It could also become an element in different types of 3D equipment: maybe a 3D printer builds onto a wire frame created by the D.I.Wire Bender, or perhaps the bender creates skeletons for vacuum-formed objects.

Eventually it could become a way of “faxing” a 3D object (send a flower to your sweetheart), producing a customized product (this bracelet fits me perfectly), or making a product on demand (I need a whisk right now!).

D.I.Wire Bender pushes the limits of what can be produced in different materials, forms, and methods, anywhere from a model shop to your home.

This project is a DIY project in the sense that it is made from spare parts from past projects and programmed and driven by open source technologies available to any enthusiast—Arduino hardware with open software libraries of OpenGL, Geomerative, and others. An Arduino board talks to our motor drivers. The board is programmed in Wiring, and Processing translates the vector art to something the Arduino can understand.

We were trying to build a DIY version of something that is typically only for mass production, and we also had the open-source community in mind. We plan on releasing our code and plans for the wire bender, and encourage the open-source community to check it out. We will work to improve it and take suggestions from the community. And, for everyone wanting one, we will continue to work on making the interface as easy to use as a 3D printer.