How to make a custom wire cutter for cleanly cutting stitches | | There are many different ways to remove the wires from the outside of the hull once you have glued the inside. | | Ordinary wire cutters have a bevel on both sides of the blade edge. This means that when you snip off the wire, and your cutters are touching the wood surface, you will leave a piece of wire sticking out that is about as long as the bevel is thick. The way wire cutters cut the wire also leaves behind a sharp tip. This is shown in this picture. The stub left behind here was from a relatively large set of wire cutters, but all of the cutters I could find left behind the same type of stub. These stubs are particularly hard to sand as they easily rip the paper. | |  | | Rather than struggling to remove these sharp points using other tools, I thought, why not get rid of that bevel? So I took a smaller pair of cutters, and cut the bevel off on the outside edge. You can see them here in this photo. When cutting the edge off, you have to be careful that you don’t take off too much because if you cut too deep, you will go beyond the tip of the blade, and start cutting into the bevel on the other side. If this happens, you will see a gap when you close the cutters. To fix this you would have to cut down the rest of the blade. If you grind away carefully however, it should not be too hard to get it to a flat cutting edge like I have done here. | |  | | Once your cutters are ready, you will see that you can now get the cutting edge to touch the wood, and when you cut there should be no sharp edge. When cutting wires I found it still left some copper extended past the wood surface, but not nearly as much as with my regular cutters. The remaining wire is much more easily sanded. | |  | | | |
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