WEB ARTICLE by DREW FRITTS  

Make Your Own Marble Tweezers

I use specially designed, homemade marble tweezers to hold the marble when knocking off the final punty, burning off the punty mark, and placing the marble in the annealing oven.  These tweezers are cheap, easy to make, and offer a secure grip:

Breaking Off The Punty	Flame Polishing The Punty Mark	Even Upside Down!

     
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Supplies and Tools Needed:

• A wire coat hanger - the thick brown kind, not the skinny white ones.
  
• Needle nose pliers
 
• Copper pipe couplers in various sizes - 1", 3/4", 1/2", and 1/4". These can be purchased at any home or hardware store that carries plumbing supplies, and are normally marked with the standard pipe sizes listed above. The actual outside diameters of these couplers are 1-3/6", 15/16", 11/16",  and 7/16" respectively.

Various Pipe Couplers

My Method:

1. Use the wire cutter feature of the needle nose pliers to cut each side of the coat hanger approximately 7-1/2" from the bottom corner. (Each coat hanger will make two tweezers.)
   
    
2. Select a pipe coupler based on the size of marbles you want the tweezers to hold. Generally, the smaller tweezers will hold marbles that are slightly larger than the outside diameter of the pipe coupler selected, up to the outside diameter of the next larger pipe coupler. However, as the size of the tweezers increases, the size range of marbles they will hold securely increases significantly. The largest tweezers will hold marbles up to 2" with no trouble.
    
3. Hold the needle nose pliers so that one jaw is lower than the other and slip the pipe coupler over the lower jaw.
   
   
4. Place one end of the wire between the pipe coupler and the upper jaw of the pliers. Hold it securely with the free end of the wire above the pliers.
      
     
5. Push down on the wire so that it starts to wrap around the pipe coupler and then release the pressure. Loosen your grip on the pliers and slip the wire further through the jaws just a little… maybe 1/8" to 1/4".
      
   
6. Tighten your grip on the wire with the pliers and repeat steps 5 and 6, bending it a little each time until the wire has been formed into a circle at the end. 
    
   NOTE: Bend the first circle so that it closes with the free end on the side of the main wire closest to you. Bend the second circle so that it closes with the free end on the opposite side of the main wire.
      
   
    
7. Gently bend a right angle where the loop meets the main wire.
   
    
8. Repeat steps 4 through 8 to create the circle on the second end of the wire.
   
    
9. Using the wire cutter feature of the pliers, cut off the ends of the wires where they overlap the circles. The cut end of each circle should not line up directly with the main handle wire. It should coil out about the width of the coat hanger wire or a little more. This will keep the ends from marring the surface of the marble. Adjust them with the pliers as necessary.
   
    
10. Twist the circles so that when they come together they form a "V". Do this by holding both handle wires in one hand and twisting each entire circle so that its cut end will be on the outside of the "V" . This will take a few attempts, over-twisting each time because of the spring in the metal. On smaller tweezers this may require you to hold the circle being twisted with the pliers, but on larger tweezers the twisting can be done by hand.
    
     
11. Make slight adjustments with the pliers to the two bends in the handle until the circles come together evenly at the ends.
    
    

      
    Various Sizes