Barbed Wire and Bullet Holes

January 27, 2025

This years PSTOIC meetup theme was to bring “Something Controversial”, so I wanted to make a medal that would reflect that.

I sketched out some ideas using barbed wire to form the frame and realised that the lettering would be difficult to create using that technique. So I added a sheet on the middle and formed the wording using “bullet holes”. A double twist looked a lot better than the single wire, so that would be a feature.

After researching how to make both of these, I sourced some suitable wire. My first experiment was with galvanised garden wire and this was too stiff to form the shapes I wanted and I didn’t have a matching size for the barbs. After realising I had a length of “twin and earth” cabling, I stripped the insulation and that gave me 2 sizes of solid copper.

Using a double length piece of wire, the basic shape was formed using the pencil sketch as a guide and then wrapped back on its self. The joint was placed on one of the uprights where it would be hidden by the plate.

The barbed wire twists were made by tightly wrapping the smaller wire around and pulling it tight with pliers. It was cut to length once this was done. Barbs were palaced on alternating wires, and I flattened the spikes a little so the were pointing outward rather than towards the wearer.

The word plate was formed from a small piece of brass sheet. The bullet holes were simply formed using a centre punch, they were too small for any of the sophisticated methods I’d seen in my research. This was folded around the uprights and crimped into place.