"Don Foreman" wrote in message
...
My wife wants some stem supports for long-stemmed flowers. She saw
them on the web for $5.95 each, wants a couple dozen of them -- for
openers.

I spent an enjoyable afternoon making a jig. I can now make her stem
supports in a minute or less each from about 35 cents worth of 1/4"
dia steel rod. (I bought 80 feet of rod a couple of days ago).

http://users.goldengate.net/~dforeman/stem_support/

That's a nice die, Don.

I find making tooling like that to be very satisfying, esspecially when it's
built quickly and saves a lot of time.

Any plans to build dies for the pre- and post-bends? Perhaps over kill, but
you can reduce your costs by not using a torch.

And if you want to get really fancy, you could combine all three dies into
one unit so that you have three parts (at different stanges of completion)
in the tool at once. Deluxe.

Tool design is fun ;-)

Regards,

Robin