How to tie a steel rod into a knot

Long gone are the days when crafts made from metal, in particular from rods, mainly for utilitarian purposes. Today this is not enough - they, moreover, must be original and aesthetic. The rod assembly certainly meets these requirements. To make it, you don’t need expensive materials, special tools or high qualifications.

Will need

For fruitful and trouble-free work, we need to prepare:

rods with a diameter of 6 and 12 mm;
vices and forks;
devices for bending rods;
furnace for heating metal;
blacksmith's pliers;
anvil and hammer.

To protect our hands from burns and our eyes from sparks and small particles, we will use gloves and safety glasses.

Tie the rod into a knot

It is simpler and easier to knit a knot on a rod with a diameter of 6 mm, but at the same time we take into account one feature of working with this material - all preparatory operations are performed cold.

We clamp the power fork in a vice and, using a hand tool in the form of a lever with grips for the rod at the end, bend it like a paper clip.

After this, we continue to bend the ends inward, crossing them.

Continuing the bend, we place one end under the opposite part of the rod, and the other on top. We bend the opposite side alternately on one side and the other, lengthening the ends more and more.

When further deformation of the knot and elongation of the ends in the cold becomes impossible, we bend the ends of the rod in opposite directions, continuing to straighten the connection, and giving it more and more symmetry.

Then we heat the not yet fully tightened knot in the oven until it glows brightly, fix it at one end in a vice, and hold it with blacksmith tongs at the other, pull with all our might in the opposite direction, tightening and sealing the knot as long as possible.

We repeat the heating and again continue to tighten the knot, but this time to the end. We make sure that it is not skewed and symmetrical about its center. Using a hammer, we straighten the ends of the rod with the knot, which is now fully formed, on an anvil.

You can tie a rod with a diameter of 12 mm into a knot only while it is hot. Heat the middle and bend it in half. Then we repeat all the operations, as with a thin rod, but only each time heating the required part of the metal and using more powerful tools.
We mainly compact the assembly using a heavy hammer, periodically heating the workpiece. The completed knot can be used to decorate and strengthen a lattice, as a leg for a candlestick, etc.