Ever get frustrated trying to set up an item to paint?  I have!  I have been using bees wax to hold my items onto a dowel and the bees wax kept on coming loose.  Maybe because of the cold temperature.  Oh my,  I had to sand again to smooth out the mistakes.

I have a tool that I love for holding items to paint, however, I only had the one.  That won’t do when you have a bunch of tiny items that need a base coat. I like have batch of items to coat at one time.  So I made several more to help me with holding.

A very simple item to build that turns out a handy tool to have.

Materials:

• dowel
• wire cutters
• music wire
• dremel or drill
• expoxy glue
• wood beads
• soldering supplies
• pliers to bend the wire
• saw

You can either leave the dowel whole or cut in half.  I cut mine in half so that I have a six inch piece.  This will become the handle.

Sand the ends smooth.

Music wire comes in 36″ length.  I cut mine up into 6″ lengths.  Use really good wire cutters as the wire is quite tough to cut.  File the ends smooth.

Wrap three wire together with some masking tape and set up to solder.

Solder the wires together at one end.  Don’t skip this step, as it is vital to the tool operating well.  If you don’t solder the ends, the wires will just turn around in the handle. Trust me, I have made the mistake of not soldering and watched my wires just twist around as they wish.

Soldered.

I measured my three wires bundle with a circle templet to determine the size of hole I would need for the wire to go into the handle.  The wires measured 7/64 so I drilled my hole 1/8 to allow room for the epoxy glue.

Double check the hole in your beads is big enough to have the wires go through too.

Mix up your epoxy glue.

Dip the soldered end of the wire bundle  into the glue and insert into your wood handle.  Add the large bead onto you wires.   Apply some more epoxy glue to the wires at the surface where the wires come out of your handle. Slide the wood bead down to meet the handle.  You want the bead to attach to the handle and help hold the wires.

Allow the glue to set up.

After the glue sets up, bend the wires out and away from each other.

Slide the smaller bead onto the wires.

Now you can turn the wire ends by bending them back towards each other.

Your tool is ready to use.  Simply slide the small bead up to close the wires together and slide the bead down to open the wires.

Here are a few of the ones I made to help me with holding items to be painted.  The one on the right is the original tool that I have had for years.  I think it was intended to hold ceramics when glaze coating.

You can vary the size of the dowel and wires to make different size tools.

Thanks for looking.  Drop me a note if you have any questions or comments