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I was wondering if anyone had an easy/economical way to make 40k scale barbed wire or concertina wire. I am trying to get scenery/terrain set up for gaming at my apartment and I don't have much right now, although an easy way to make wire obstacles would help.

I have been working with taking thin wire and wrapping even thinner wire around that. Takes a while to do but it looks like the GW wire.

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/314348.page

Here is a good tutorial for making Concertina Wire.

 DarkKnights44 wrote:
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/314348.page

Here is a good tutorial for making Concertina Wire.

About the best way to do it. When I have to replenish my stock - I generally will go through and make 50 feet or so of it. I have a jig set up to let me make 4 foot sections at a time, and it goes pretty quick once you find your rhythm. The jig isn't anything fancy - just a length of 1x4 with posts on either end. One for the fixed hook and another which has a crank assembly for twisting the wire. Few other bits which are related to my process.

I use a 30 gauge bare copper wire for mine - smaller than what he used in the article. In order to fix the barbs in place - I will generally go ahead and use solder...just because I like the result. While the length of assembled barb wire is still on the jig, I smother it with flux and then heat the length with a propane torch. Touch of solder every few inches flows in between the two main strands and the barbs. Then I cut the excess wire off the barb strands. The solder makes the wire a bit stronger and less likely to break when you bend the wire. Superglue tends to be pretty brittle - and it can lead to "kinks" in the fine wire I use and those kinks can quite easily become snaps.

That looks like an awesome tutorial, thank you for showing it to me DarkKnights44. Do either of y'all have experience with it? I wanted to make coiled wire that would be almost as tall as a standard 28mm GW figure. I was thinking something like this picture, is it too brittle or maybe is it flexible to do this?

Plenty flexible for making tossed coils like those. The problem ends up being when you need to make really tight right angle bends...and even then, you are generally fine...till you change you mind and try to bend it back straight.

The wire itself is plenty strong and flexible - but metals tend to get brittle if you bend them sharply. The thinner the metal, the more quickly the entire cross section fatigues...and then of course it just snaps.

For making coils like those - I generally will wrap it somewhat loosely around a length of brass pipe (I think it is 3/8" diameter). Two rolls are about as tall as an GW figure. Originally I tried using wooden dowels to wrap it around, but I found that the barbs would sink into the wood and be a pain to slide off. With the brass pipe - it just slides right off and then I can pull the coils out to make barricades like you show in your picture.

Just remember though - it takes a fair amount of wire to create things like that. Eyeballing one of mine I have about 1 coil per 1/4". That ends up being about 8" of wire to make 1" of coils 1 level high. If you do three sets of coils like that - you have 24" per 1" of barricade. Something relatively small - say 6" long barricade would need 12 feet of barbed wire...give or take a few feet depending on the spacing on the loops.

When we did up some trench terrain at a friends house - we used a few hundred feet of it. It wasn't even as dense as it would be on a real battle field like you might find in WWI - but looked pretty good when it was all done.

This is another option that looks great in person!

http://www.secretweaponminiatures.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=12&products_id=75

For Australia I found $6-7 wire on ebay for 25m 0.2mm, which would make you 4-7m(12-21 ish feet) of barbed wire depending how you tie the wires (especially the 3rd, although at least you get spare metal out of it that could be used as rubble fill as a standin for the rebar used in concrete).

Thanks everyone, I appreciate the input. I am going to try to make some very soon. I like the Secret Weapon Miniatures stuff (especially because of their military/veteran discount) and I might try that later.