I’ve used stretched sprue in the past, but it can be tricky business. Anyone else have any other suggestions?
You could try old guitar strings of various thicknesses.
Depends on the scale, but I use twisted 22 gauge wire for mine. I take about half the strands for a 1/72 scale model. Hold one end in a pair of hemostats and the other in a pair of long nose pliers. Spin the hemostats and voila! Antennae. You can cut them for whatever length you need. Here’s a pair on a 1/72 scale M3A2ODS I did for a weekend group build…
I normally use stiff brass wire that I picked up at the LHS for my 1/35 builds. It comes in packs of six, one-foot lengths for about $3.50. I normally use the .010" diameter (even though it’s a tad overscale) because the smaller diameters are a bit harder to work with.
Enjoy your modeling…
I use .015" piano wire from the LHS. That works out to just over 1/2 inch diameter in 1/35th scale.
HEY,
I dont know about armor, but i know for autos, i use just about whatever wire i can find, usually just speaker wire. Twisting it works great if you can twist it enough to make it look like one peice, but guitar strings are great. Good luck and happy hunting.
Randy
As has been mentioned, guitar string, piano wire, or brass/steel/whatever rod.
These days I’ve been using brass rod.
The best “scale” wire I’ve seen was (is) at Hobby Lobby.Go look in the floral dept.,and get some floral wire.You can get it in many thicknesses,and for about a dollar,you get about 50 or more 1 foot length wires.It comes in natural metal (silver),and drab green).I think you’ll be pleased.
I kinda like using cat’s whiskers sometimes. They aren’t a constant diameter and are usually a bit curved, but they straighten out easily and look A-O-K…
And no I don’t yank 'em out… [;)]
Fade to Black…
It does depend on scale, of course. On 1-72 and 1-87 models I find the individual hairs from a paint brush work pretty good.
We recently burned up a couple electric motors at work, now i have a few(!) feet of copper wire to use. Works great.
call me old fashioned but I just heat up a piece of sprue and stretch it out , works good for me.
I use the wire from gardening ties(approx 0.25mm), strip off the plastic covering and then use one strand of copper from a stripped telephone or alarm multicore cable to wrap around the base of the antenna as the spring assembly. A dot of superglue keeps it in place. For the bead on the top, dip the end in white glue and hang it upside down overnight.
I strongly second (or third or fourth…) the music wire idea. Music wire has the ability to bend and curve. I’ve broken off too many antennae made from brass or other wire, simply because they don’t have any “give”.
If you ever want to bend an antenna over and tie it down, music wire does the trick there, too. And it also gives a nice bowed, under tension appearance.
Gip Winecofff
Just picked up some 1.372mm (0.054in) phosphor bronze wound guitar string, as well as some 1/32 brass rod. Figured I’d give each one a shot and see how it goes.
The 1/32 brass wire is a little wide for antenna at 1/35 scale, it turns out. However, the guitar string, once the outside “spring” is stripped off, is perfect! Very flexible, and with the wrapping coiled at the bottom, very realistic looking.
4mm beads are too large for the ball on top of the antenna, it turns out. Probably 2mm would be better, but they’re hard to find.
Anyway, thought you all might appreciate the update.