Jewelry Making - How to Bend Wire

When bending wire for jewelry making, one needs to consider the finished piece. Quite frequently, you will just need to bend the jewelry wire to make an angle in the wire. This is one of the steps in making many jewelry wire components -- making a sharp, crisp bend in the wire. Making a crisp bend in wire is done by grasping the wire firmly in the jaws of chain nose or bent chain nose pliers. Hold the wire so that it is essentially perpendicular to the jaws of the pliers. Then push the wire against the jaws of the pliers. Push by pressing the wire as close to the jaws as possible.

A jewelry tool called "chain nose pliers" have smooth, flat jaws so that they can hold the jewelry wire while spreading the gripping force across the flat face of the pliers and thereby leaving minimal marks on the wire. The needle nose pliers used by electricians are not an acceptable substitute for jeweler's chain nose pliers because they contain grooves which leave marks on wire. In general, the better chain nose pliers have thin tapered tips (about 1mm at the tip). This feature becomes important when making the bend in the wire necessary to complete the wrapped bead link described in Page 11.

This technique is a very basic jewelry making skill.

You can view the two steps in bending wire below:

Grasp the Wire


Push the wire against the jaws of the pliers