Smithing a Manly Hairpin

For the past two years I haven't cut my hair. It's now quite long. For most of this time I've been wearing it in a pony-tail with a normal elastic hairband, but recently I got bored of that. So I started looking on google for things to do with my hair. Unfortunately, most hair-oriented-articles on the web are oriented towards women, and while I can appreciate ladies hairstyles, very very few of them were something I (as a guy) would feel comfortable wearing.

Eventually, I came across a couple of forged hairpins and went "I could wear that"

So here it is, a hairpin that is probably as manly as they come.

From fire and steel a clip is made

It's sole purpose my hair to tame.

With ringing hammers

and strength of hand

A skill is learned, and style earned.

A couple of my friends (both guys and ladies) have asked me to make them some, so I thought I'd write up an 'ible so you guys can have them too. It's a nice easy thing to make on a Saturday morning, and if you've never done anything with a propane torch and metal before, it's probably a pretty good introduction.

If you like this instructable, it'd be amazing if you could vote for it in the jewellery contest

Tools:

• Forge
• Hammer, two pairs of pliers
• Something to hammer onto (I use a bench vise)
• Angle Grinder
• Gloves, Earmuffs, Safety Glasses.

I use a propane torch and some firebrick as my forge. It isn't ideal, but it works. Because I'm hammering very close to this assembly, I use a clamp to stop the torch from rolling around. Note that the firebrick isn't sitting directly on the wooden box - there is some steel angle holding it a couple centimetres above. This stops the box from getting in contact with the firebrick. One of these days I'll get some refractory brick and not have to worry about my work surface catching alight.....

Materials

• 3-5mm steel rod. For extra points use things like:
• #8 fencing wire
• a 3/16th chainsaw file

You need to cut a 21cm length of your steel rod. This will be the main body of your hairpin. The exact length isn't super critical. You can probably go down to 15cm and up to 25cm, but it will change the amount of hair you can capture in your hairpin. I find 21cm to be pretty close to ideal.

I was using #8 fencing wire, and didn't want to breath too many zinc fumes, so before getting out the forge/propane torch, I spent a couple minutes grinding off the galvanising.

Time to fire up the forge! Because the metal is so thin it will cool down very quickly - so you want to heat quite a long area. I find that the best way to do this with my propane-torch-forge is to put the wire parallel with the blue-cone in the flame - as shown in the diagram. This means that you can heat a 5-6cm length of wire quickly - rather than relying on the heat of the forge, or only heating a small part "in"the flame.

You want to hammer the ends of the wire flat, starting the taper about 3-4cm away from the ends. You want it to ease it's way from thick and round to thin and flat.

When hammering the wire flat, you should flip it over every couple of strokes. If you don't, it will get a curve in it. Getting a curve isn't the end of the world - you just have to hammer it out. Bear in mind that metal always bends upwards when you hammer it, so flip it over or turn it on it's side so that the "bend upwards" will correct the bend in your wire.

At the end of this step, you should have a piece of metal with the two ends flattened - a bit like some sort of kayak paddle.

Now we want to make the body of the hairpin square - so heat up the middle of the workpiece and take turns hammering at 90 degree angles. I find a sequence of couple hammer blows, rotate 90, a few more hammer blows and then back into the forge to heat up. With soft wire (like fencing wire), you could actually do this step entirely cold, but if you're using some harder steel (like a chainsaw file), then you have to be a lot more diligent about keeping it hot.

This hairpin I made square all the way from one end to the other, but another option would be to leave the parts near the end rounded. It's up to you.

Similarly, you don't have to go to completely square - you can leave some slightly rounded edges on it (more octagonal), but the more rounded the edges are the less the twist will be visible. Once again you should try keep the workpiece straight.

Bear in mind that if you do lots of hammering to make it square, the piece will get narrower and longer, so don't go crazy on this step!

This step is actually simpler than it sounds: heat up the bar, grab opposite sides with pliers and twist through 90 degrees. Repeat until sufficiently twisted.

That said, there is a bit of a knack to getting a nice twist: when bending something, it will bend where it is weakest. In this step, that means that the metal will twist where it is hottest. As a result you want a very even heat in the middle of the bar. If one spot is hotter than another, it will absorb more of the twist than the other part.

You can use this to your advantage: if one part didn't twisted enough after one rotation - make sure it is hotter than the other parts for the next one.

Time to put a curl in the ends - just the tips. Once again heat up the ends of the bar in the forge, and using a pair of needlenose pliers, start a curl. Because the pliers are cold, they will tend to "freeze" the metal where they grab. This makes bending the very end into a nice curve a little bit harder. One solution I found is to "squish" the end of the curl as shown. This means that the pliers have a lot less contact, so heat is lost from the tip more slowly and so the bend can be continued to nearer the end.

I find it looks nice if you don't just suddenly start the curl but ease into it gradually. This kind-of fits with the way that it tapers down gradually.

Curl each side in opposite directions so that you end up with a "S" shape. If you curl them both the same way it isn't the end of the world - just put another half-twist in the middle!

The challenge in this step is that you want both curls to be about the same shape......

You should be able to do this bend in a single action. Heat it nice and evenly, grab both sides of the bend and then just go for it.

Once again, getting it symmetric can be a little challenging, but you can always re-heat it and twiddle the shape with the pliers. Doing it in one-go (per side) does means the curve will be nice and smooth.

The figure-8 shape isn't flat. It needs to be able to capture hair, so the whole thing should have a gentle curve in it. I find it easiest to do this directly over a propane torch, though I suspect that's because there isn't a nice way to put a weird shape like this into my forge and have it heat evenly.

But anyway, for this step I hold the hair-pin directly over the flame.

First give the main bar a curve - which will leave the ends poking out in a triangle, then curve the ends back around to match the center-parts curve.

We now have a fancy figure-8 shape, but it can't contain hair on it's own. Hair is caught by putting a straight rod through the loops. Time to forge that pin.

For this we need to cut another length of wire about 1cm longer than the body

Just like in step2, we need to flatten one end of the pin. Unlike step2, we will be tapering the other.

Tapering the end is pretty much a combination of flattinging and creating a square: you are hammering near the end, putting more hammerblows the nearer the end you get (so it gets narrower), but you're also rotating it by 90 degrees regularly so that it doesn't get wider as it get's thinner.

Curl the flat end of the pin, but this time, curl it all the way around into more of a loop. This loop stops the pin sliding all the way through and provides a bit of a "latch" to keep the pin in place.

Done! Give things a rinse under some water to make sure they're cooled down and you are ready to put it in your har. But.... you have two odd shape pieces of metal. How do you put them in your hair and get them to stay?

When viewed from the side with the pin through, there is a gap between the pin and the figure-8. This is where the hair goes. To get it there, you slide the pin in through one hole, then tilt it to get it through the other. Doing so compresses the hair between the two parts of the hair-pin, preventing the pin or the hair from sliding.

If it isn't gripping enough, you can flatten the curve (which makes the area smaller). If the hole isn't big enough to fit all the hair through, you can make the curve rounder (which makes the area bigger).

If you don't have a forge, you can still make this project - you just have to use thinner, softer wire. Here's one that I made from 2mm fencing wire without a propane torch or any heat source.

The major difference is that putting in the twist is quite a bit harder. The metal wants to "fold" rather than to twist evenly. Other than that, it makes a perfectly functional (and shinier) hairpin.

If you liked this instructable, it'd be great if you could vote for it in the jewellery contest