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I am from South Africa and I want to start figure sculpting using polymer clay and I am clean out of ideas on how and where to find aluminium wire for my armatures in my country. Yes, you read that right, it is not available in my country at all. The only way I found to get it is to import it. There are 2 big problems with that option.

  1. Import costs are more than a few several hundred US dollars regardless if it's from China or the US. Exchanging those costs to my country's currency equals more than 10k, which is ridiculously expensive in my country. It's more than 10 times the price of just the wire.
  2. There's a 99% chance that once the shipment arrives at SA customs it will be stolen by the customs workers. It's a serious epidemic in my country.

I have tried steel and bind wire but it's impossible to work with. I broke 2 pliers trying to bend the bind wire. Copper wire cannot be bought unless you have a permit and a business license since it's the second most stolen thing in the entire country, and it's only sold then in bulk. Getting specific gauges is also a nightmare as the people who work with it don't even know what the term gauge means, yes you read that right too.

I have exhausted all my energy trying to find something at least a little similar but to no avail. Any help would be much appreciated.

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    Is chicken fence wire available? That works pretty well, and you can cut it if necessary.
    – Joachim ♦
    Commented Jul 17 at 20:52
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    Only in mesh form and they are very thin
    – TheeHandler
    Commented Jul 18 at 7:19
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    I added it as an answer. It's quite easy in use and to adapt to your needs.
    – Joachim ♦
    Commented Jul 18 at 8:49

2 Answers 2

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How about chicken fence wire/poultry netting?

image of roll of hexagonal chicken fence wire
source

By rolling up pieces you can get strong structures, and it's quite easy to model a basic shape with it. Clay will easily adhere. It's also usually easy to cut, so you can cut off wires or smaller strips to act as such. It can be combined with wooden slats for volume or strength.
Fence wire is available in different shapes, but in my experience the hexagonal shape seen in the image above is the most flexible and easiest to work with.

An alternative - if it's available in your country - is aluminum (sculpting) mesh:

photo of pieces of aluminum sculpting meshes; one unused, one warped
source

It's basically a finer version of the fence wire, but seems to be easier to manipulate, and intended for more detailed work (I have no experience with it).

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    I know that many schools have a very tight budget, so if they want to offer sculpting classes they use cheap chicken wire. It's quite rough for paper maché (you could still see the wires underneath), but should work fine for clay.
    – Elmy ♦
    Commented Jul 19 at 5:04
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Steel wire comes in a wide range of thicknesses. Fence wire is likely to be too stiff but much thinner wire (1mm) is used in gardening for tying plants to supports, and for joining chicken wire.

Another source of thin steel wire is from bike cables. The inner cables are twisted and you may not get them straight enough, but gear (and uncommon "compressionless" brake cable) outers use many strands of straight wire. wires from a bike gear cable housing.

These strands are 0.5mm so probably at the thin end of what you might want. They could be good for supplementing chicken wire if you want something other than mesh.

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