 I'm on this quest to rebuild civilization by building myself up technologically from the very beginning. Breaking into the world of electricity and electrical components, I ran into one minor hurdle. Wire. Turning metal into long, thin pieces of wire has turned out to be a little bit more difficult than I expected. But let's dive into this and see exactly what it'll take to make some wire. I've actually done a few videos trying to make wire before. Several years ago I did some gold dry panning in the desert with William Osmond and attempted to turn the gold we collected into a long piece of wire. The actual process ended up being frustratingly difficult, with it continuously breaking and losing really expensive pieces of gold piece by piece. Actually drying it into a long piece of wire never ended up really working out. Later I explored similar topics covered in the anime series Dr. Stone where they addressed the challenge with a creative, although dubious, centrifuge device to theoretically produce thin gold wire using basically a cotton candy machine. My attempts to recreate this were quite unsuccessful as well though. Historically this process has been done for centuries, basically using the same method as what I tried the first time with the gold wire. However there were clearly some tricks I was missing. When it comes to historical methods of drying your own wire, I basically found only one source online, Ironskin. So I set up a call to talk and get some tips from them. I'm Sebastian from Ironskin. We are a small business of four people and we help people with chainmail. So we do tailored chainmail, we help provide tools and instructions. So I did this whole video on trying to make wire before without much luck. I think my biggest issue is that I ended up starting with gold, it's kind of expensive material to mess around with. What's your general advice when somebody is first learning how to pull wire? Before you start pulling, blacksmiths and shape it to somewhat smooth shape. So materials, some of them become very brittle after a short time of cold working and that's what you're doing when you pull wire. Soften the wire by heating it up, that's called a kneeling and you do that every couple of steps. Another mistake is you need to have proper drawing plates and they need holes to be spaced in a correct ratio. You can't just go from a very large hole to a very small, they need to be say 10% or less decreasing in size. What's the largest project you've made with riveted mail? Most of the time I make shirts for large and for small people, can weigh up to 15 kilograms. Add that up, a shirt contains about 30,000 rings. That takes me about two minutes per ring, 1000 for two minutes a ring. How long did that take you to do? Yeah, almost half a year. What we found most useful from his videos was the use of a windlass to apply extra power to the pulling. He also demonstrated a basic rig that holds the pliers tight while the rope is under pressure that greatly helped in this endeavor. Thanks again to Sebastian, be sure to check out their website ironskin.com for lots of useful information on historical wire drawing and chainmail making. But first thing you need to do to sponsor BetterHelp, a new from a personal experience that there are often times when you need some outside help to help you get through some difficult situations. Trying to handle your struggles on your own is a heavy burden and getting professional help can be all the difference in the world. Whether through BetterHelp or other avenues, it's incredible how seeking professional help can make a real difference. The very first step of just finding your therapist can be kind of the largest burden to overcome. But today's sponsor BetterHelp can make those first steps super easy by connecting you with a licensed therapist best suited for your needs. You can take the first steps by heading to their site betterhelp.com slash htme. BetterHelp matches you with an experienced professional tailored to your needs. The best part you can engage with your therapist from the comfort of your own space through messaging, phone calls, or video chat. BetterHelp usually matches you within 48 hours, ensuring a swift start to your mental health journey. What better help be your guide to a better and happier you? Visit betterhelp.com slash htme or choose htme during your sign up for an exclusive discount on your first month. Remember, mental health matters and taking that first step is a sign of strength. While tackling this topic and achieving a better success added has been the top of my list. My new assistant Elliot had his own special interest in this topic and spent several days troubleshooting and figuring out how to finally achieve success in the process. I took some schooling and electrical engineering. Also I'm just an enthusiast and hobbyist of electronics. I've been messing with them since I could turn a screwdriver. Wire in particular I think just has a lot of uses. A lot of people like the obvious one is chainmail. Small wire in particular means you can make magnet wire. So very high gauge, tiny, tiny filaments of wire, meaning you could make generators, motors, electromagnets of pretty much any kinds. There's just a lot you can do with magnet wire. The process is kind of insane. It's very laborious and it was a huge learning curve for me. First of all, understanding the annealing process. Honestly, I'm surprised it worked at all. What we're going to start out with today is just a scrap piece of round rod. I'd say it's probably some motors between quarter and half inch round rod. The idea is we're going to draw that out to the most narrow diameter we can. We're going to start out drawing it out square. Get that as long as we can. And then we're going to knock out the corners, make it into an octagon, and then round that off to finish it off. But the idea is the smaller we can get it here, the less work we have to do when we pull it through the draw plates. So that's the idea. We'll see how it goes. Okay, so we've got our basic rod forged out. It measures in at just under four millimeters. So I think that's a pretty good starting point considering that was all done by hand. Then we have our basic rig set up here. The holes in this die basically increment, I believe, in tenths of millimeters. And then what we have set up here is a basic kind of like tension system. So as this pulls, it'll tighten down on the pliers and hold them attached to the rod. Down here, we just have a basic kind of crank system set up. So I guess we can give it a try, see how we do. It takes quite a bit of force, especially when we're at this size of rod. And it kind of bounces around like that in the first few holes just because we've got some inconsistencies in the size of the rod. And there we are. We just do that about 40 more times. This is pretty much our end product at this point. We figured we started at about maybe five inches of raw material and we've ended up with basically 50 inches of wire. So a 500% increase in length, not too bad. Final diameter, I think, came in at 2.2 millimeters. I'm pretty pleased with the result, considering what we started out with. Also, during the like hand forge stage, getting out as many of the imperfections as possible before getting to the drawing stage is ideal. Finally, the rig, I think, has room for many improvements. It's incredible how much force it takes, really, to pull this. At one point, I was lifting up the entire workbench just to crank it. I wouldn't underestimate how much cranking power you need. So we just have another, what, half-mile to go? After the point of making actual wire, our project is going to kind of split in two directions now, historically. Wires used in pre-modern time was primarily for jewelry or for making armor with chainmail. The two closely cut rings are riveted together, deforming nearly impenetrable piece of armor. It's an incredibly slow process, so actually finishing the armor will be part of a later video. For now, our focus is going to be on a more modern use of wire, electronics. So for that, we're going to want to use the more conductive metal of copper to draw some wire. Overall, the process is pretty similar to drawing iron wire, but potentially easier. Starting with a two-inch chunk of ingot, we hammered it down to about two feet. By slowly drawing it down through narrower and narrower draw holes, the wire was stretched longer and longer. To let the end, we reached over 40 feet long. It was, at this point, the wire started to break, so called it good enough, reaching the diameter of about a 16-gauge wire. To demonstrate the new potential that this wire allows for us, we attempted to construct a crude electromagnet by wrapping the wire around a piece of iron and keeping everything insulated from each other through the use of beeswax and cloth. When a current is applied, it can create a temporary magnet that can be turned on and off by applying a current or disconnecting it. To power it, we brought back the original first battery we made last year, the Voltaic Pile. With our size of battery, though, it didn't contain a lot of power, so the effect was pretty minimal, but it's enough to prove the concept. So we are getting decent voltage. That's like a nine-volt battery right there, but we're operating in the order of milliamps. So improving the battery, not using fair wire would be nice, because the more tightly wrapped the coil is, the more power we're gonna get out of the magnet, and then just many, many more turns of the wire. I think it works. So the concept of wire is probably not the most interesting or fascinating. This little device really opens the door, especially when you use it to make things like the electromagnet. This is a fairly crude one that was mostly just for demonstration purposes, but a little bit of refining, mostly by getting some actual insulation on our wire so we can wind it a lot more and tighter, and probably most important, getting a stronger battery, we can actually build some pretty powerful electromagnets. It is a pretty crucial invention for doing things like motors, generators, the telegraph, and we're actually gonna try and make our own telegraph system pretty soon here, and basically invent our own very first telecommunication network. So this invention and process of making actual wire has been with us for centuries, and it's only with real modern knowledge can do a little bit more advanced things with electricity. You know what I'm just gonna allow us to make some major jumps ahead in kind of the time scale we're in. That being said, we're still working on the chainmail, and it's gonna be one component of the suit of armor that we'll be building, and we're basically building that just to destroy it and to see just how durable some armor is. Kind of a different ends of the spectrum on the uses of wire from both durable production to eventually being used to help spread information at the speed of light. Thank you again to all of my supporters on Patreon. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics. Also, if you've enjoyed these series, consider supporting us on Patreon. We are largely a fan-funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going. Thanks for watching.