Here are some torture tools I made out of paperclips.
As you can see below, I used paperclips that have a rubber coating on them. You could use plain ones or solid-core wire with insulation.
Bend the wire straight and strip off most of the coating – what remains will become our handle. Then place it on a very hard surface (I used the anvil on a bench vise for most of it) and tap it with a hammer to flatten it. (just the “blades”, not the handle!)
For the curved blades, I simply bent the paperclip before flattening with the hammer. Make different sized tools, but keep the handles about the same length.
When it came time to paint, I clipped a few into a binder clip, then removed the handles of the binder clip. This gave me something to hold onto, and allowed me to set them down.
I just painted the handles espresso brown.
Gave them a black wash:
That’s it, all Done!
….oh wait… what’s that on the left? BLACKSMITH TONGS?? 😀
Yes. And they have real blacksmith-like tonging action, Muahahaha!!!
Let’s cut 2 more wires and bend them a little at the end:
Next, we use only the very corner of our hard hammering anvil/surface, so we can flatten just the section where the hinge would be:
If you look very closely above, you can see superglue at the spot where they overlap.
The superglue wouldn’t hold after 2 tries, so I got frustrated and decided to go whole hog and add a real hinge.
First, I cut them to size and bent them into the shape I wanted:
(Pause where I ran to Hobby Lobby and bought a pin vice. I was that determined.)
Then I went at it:
Dry fit with a straight pin:
Got tired of running over to my vice, so used the center of some pliers as a little anvil:
Snip and tap:
Success!
And here’s the whole family, with a final black wash. Also added a little brown wash to the tongs:
