Frame Wire 3kg spool

01 · THE FEEL

0.50 mm and soft to work, not a spring

The documented batch declares a tensile strength of 716 to 796 N/mm², a low figure for stainless: that is the annealing. The wire bends and knots without springing back, and at 0.50 mm it leaves you around fifteen kilos of margin before it breaks. Tensioning by hand you will not snap it; where it does snap is at a badly finished knot.

02 · WHY STAINLESS

It survives the wax boiler and the store

Galvanised wire pits with damp and suffers in wax melting; stainless comes through intact, which is why the frame gets rewired and reused instead of thrown away. In exchange, one detail worth knowing before the first batch: stainless conducts electricity less well and heats more slowly in the embedder than the galvanised wire you are used to. Try it on one frame and set the timing before you run fifty.

03 · THE FORMAT

Three kilos is the middle spool

Close to 1,950 metres give you in the order of 950 Langstroth frames wired on four lines, and rather more on three. It is the midpoint of the range: the 500 g spool rewires the odd frame; the 6 kg one is for wiring in batches.

04 · BEFORE YOU BUY

Coming from 0.55 galvanised, this is finer and more docile, but it heats differently: repeat the embedding test.