CNC wire bending

Dan Gelbart, a master prototyper and Creo founder, says that if a product can be made out of wire, it should be. It’s difficult to find a non-video source for this, but these UBC course notes are a good start. His rationale is the lack of waste (unlike sheet metal fabrication) and single-phase production with minimal post-processing.

In practice, it can be challenging to design a mechanism or even a part entirely out of wire. Researchers at Disney published Bend-It: Design and Fabrication of Kinetic Wire Characters in 2018. Regardless, a machine that can crank out precisely-bent wire lengths would be useful.

Low-cost machines