Budget rolling mills minimum distance?

[Icarleug]

Hello everyone!

I have a question to those who have any experience with budget rolling mills, that is the cheap Indian ones sold by Cookson, Proops, t4j and other retailers.
On Proops and t4j I see that they state that the minimum distance you can roll sheet to is 26 SWG which would be about .4 mm. I asked Cookson and they said their budget rolling mill had a minimum sheet thickness of .2 mm.

Well, I can sort of get that I can't draw 0.00001 mm sheet, but I was curious to if the minimum sheet was because of pressure to the rollers or a minimum distance.
It would come mostly into play when flattening filigree wire since I would like it to get as thin as possible. 0.4 mm is a bit thick, and I can get that thickness with my pasta roller (Cooksons would do the trick, but then I would not get any wire rollers other than the v and u-shaped ones). If the limitation is due to the rollers never touching there is not much to do about it, if it is roller pressure it might flatten a bit more since the pressure on a single wire would be a lot more than on a sheet.

Do anyone have a budget roller and could perhaps enlighten me a bit more about how they work and if it is possible to roll down thinner sheets and wire than the distance specified?

/Andreas

[medusa]

I don't know but I kinda regret giving my pasta roller away now!

[ps_bond]

Frame & roller flex are major considerations for both minimum thickness and repeatability. I don't have a budget rolling mill - used one briefly, then decided that it wasn't up to the job I needed it for so bought a Durston (which I'm starting to find to be too small!).

[Dennis]

Mine has 80mm of flat roller, which I think is the minimum to aim for. 100mm would be more useful. Having compared two Durstons at college, I'm glad I went for one with gears. Dennis.

[Icarleug]

I know that the 76mm budget mill is small, however, since this is a hobby I don't see myself needing a large one for some time.

The thing I am interested in is how thin you can roll things out.
I probably will be satisfied with a .4 mm sheet, but I would like to roll my filigree wire out as well (since it is tedious to flatten it with a hammer).
At least nowadays proops and t4j claim a minimum distance of .4 mm for the flat rollers and I kind of wondered if that is because of a gap of .4 mm or if the manufacturer states that because a maximum width sheet won't go any thinner than that.

It would be a bummer to buy a £200 rolling mill to find out that I still need to flatten my wire by hand.

/Andreas

[Dennis]

Sorry we are not helping you much, but if you phoned Cookson Birmingham,someone there should give you some insight as to why this problem exists. Certainly if the rollers can be closed into contact there can be no reason why you cant roll wire down to 0.25 mm say.

As for your only being a hobbyist, this has been my retirement hobby for twenty years and one thing I have learned is that you don't get stuck in just one of the many techniques. Nor, if you are exploring all the possibilities, do you do things in the same way day after day. You will certainly not be making only filigree for the rest of your life.

For instance roll texturing is an important way to use your mill. So if you do this, or even just roll down plain sheet, you don't want to be limited to 50mm widening to 70mm. Also when you have elongated you sheet or even wire, you might want to put it through sideways. So in the long term the widest rollers you can afford will be your aim.

Dennis.

[mizgeorge]

If it's any help, I just rolled some .8mm wire down to .25mm in a single pass with no problems. I could happily have gone further, but I don't want to alter my settings right now as I'm in the middle of a batch of bits.

[Icarleug]

I finally caved in and bought me a Proops budget rolling mill (got the blue version), so I thought that I'll answer my own question in case anyone comes around looking for the same answer.

There is no problem in setting the rollers close together, so theoretically one can roll a very thin sheet if the rollers are perfectly even and spotless.
I have not tried rolling any sheet yet, but I did have a go at some old practice filigree wire and got it down to .15 mm with no problem whatsoever.
Strange that Proops claims that there is a minimum distance for it, but I guess they don't want anyone to crack the mill by making it too narrow...

It is a big upgrade from using a hammer and anvil to flatten the wire.

/Andreas

[The Button Princess]

Am new to making silver jewellery and a rolling mill is on my wish list...just wondering if your comment was a serious one, that I could save some pennies initially by using a pasta maker???

[Icarleug]

Hi!

For flattening small diameter wire; absolutely, for any size sheet: no.
The stress on the pasta maker would crack it in a second.
My pasta make could flatten 1.2 or 1 mm round wire to approximately 0.4 mm in several passes, but I would think that is about the maximum (perhaps a few fractions of a mm more) unless you go really slow with multiple passes and thicknesses.
The pasta maker is not designed to flatten metal.

I have heard that it works very well with the different kinds of metal clay though, but I have never tried it. And you should probably not use it for pasta after that.

If you need to buy a new one just for this I would probably advice you to order a budget rolling mill instead, it really is a big difference.

/Andreas