How to Make or Modify a Wax Pen Tip for Jewelry Buildup or Repair

If you do any casting, or have others do casting for you, you will need to have the ability to repair or modify your waxes, and in order to do that, you need a Wax Pen. I have an older wax pen, without all the bells and whistles, and it still works great. I have pen tips that I have modified to make work the way I like, so today I will show you an inexpensive way to make your wax pen tip “magical”.

The Wax Pen Tips that comes with most wax pens are usually blunt and not well defined. I have a cure for that, with a little brass (or silver) wire, wrapped around the tip. This technique can be used on most wax pen tips. I use approximately a 22-24 gauge wire for this (.5mm) and wrap the wire several times around the tip of the pen, this makes for good contact and good heat transfer.

I then trim the end of the wire off, leaving about a 5mm-8mm length of wire protruding from the end of the tip. I file or sand the very end flat. This helps the wax stay at the end of the wire during wax transfer from one place to another.

Now this tip can easily transfer small amounts of wax from a scrap piece of wax. to the wax you are working on. you will have to play with the temp settings a bit, but you will quickly get the hang of it and be able to fill pits, build up areas, even make prongs for settings.

Another way of doing this is to solder a wire to the end of your wax tip. I do this, and “bead” up the very end of the wire to help it grab and hold onto a larger drop of wax. In this case, I used a silver wire and attached it with regular medium solder. The pen does not get hot enough to melt the solder. Both techniques work good and are necessary for good wax repair.

At this point I will refrain from making any reference to Mr. Miyagi and/or the phrase “Wax-off – Wax on”, as hard as that is to do at this moment.

Hope this helps if you are new to wax working, and as always, thanks for dropping by.

Now go “Wax Eloquent!

Doug