How to Make Barbed Wire - Part 5 of the How to Make a World War 2 Diorama

Barbed wire is not hard to make. It takes a little bit of time but with practice you will get real good at it and be able to crank it out. In this tutorial I show you how to easily make several different types of barbed wire. All you need is some thin solid wire and you can improvise this from found materials. I use telephone wire which is 24 gauge. You can often scrounge this wire from spare parts or old electronic equipment that is no good. The video for this tutorial is at the bottom of the page.

miniature barbed wire

Here are the three styles of barbed wire that I show you how to make.

Standard barbed wire

This is the common style of barbed wire. It is a cattle fence. You can have one strand of wire or two.

Barbed Wire style 2

Here is the second style of barbed wire. The actual wire is made the same way as in the first style. The posts are different. These are a little bit more military.

Concertina wire

This the third style wire. It is like concertina wire and it is the most popular and most dramatic. This type is made a bit differently than the previous two. I will show you how I made this.

Recommended tools:

I recommend you use needle nose pliers for this project. If possible you should have two pair. It makes the job much easier.

You are also going to need some type of wire stripping pliers. This takes the insulation off the wire and leaves the bare conductor.

The following picture shows the process I use for getting the wire. I used bell wire which has four conductors (1). I strip it out of the sheath and use two of the conductors (2) which here are black and green. I then strip off all the insulation so it is just bare wire. And finally I twist them together in a rough and erratic shape (3.) Don't wrap the wires evenly. It looks much better if it is uneven. Also, for the concertina wire I showed you above I don't wrap two wires together. I simply use a single wire. This looks much better.

Now let's add the little spikes

The Barbs

Now cut yourself a whole lot of small pieces of wire. These will be the barbs. Simply wrap them with a single wrap right onto the barbed wire string as shown in the picture. If you have needle nose pliers you should be able to get it nice and tight. But if you have trouble keeping them in place then you can add just a small drop of super glue. I space mine out for 1/72 scale at about 1/2 inch.

pre bent barbs

The job is a lot easier and goes a lot faster if you make up a whole bunch of barbs by cutting small pieces and pre bending them.

If you are making the circular concertina style barbed wire you simply put the barbs on a single strand of wire then wrap it around a cylindrical object like a dowel or a pencil. Adjust the size according to your scale. A pencil is a good size for 1/72 scale military. Finally, paint it silver.

wrapped wire

Barbed Wire style 2

To make the posts you can use toothpicks or something else that is the right scale. simply punch small holes in the diorama and glue the toothpicks in place.

The picture below shows two types of barbed wire installed into a diorama.

the installed barbed wire

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Here is the video for this part of the tutorial

Let's move on to the next part of this tutorial: How to add Mud and Rubble to your diorama

Scene-A-Rama Kits

Scene-A-Rama Basic Diorama Kit - Use this kit to create a flat, landscaped surface for your project. It includes everything you need to make plains, prairies, grasslands, farmlands, woods and meadows.

Scene-A-Rama Bushes, Foliage & Grasses Kit - Use this kit to create short and tall grasses, weeds, bushes, shrubs, hedges, ivy, flowering plants and roads and paths.