Drawing wire to size

[Johnny Bravo]

Anybody have any experience with drawing wire down to size? And not the 2B or not 2B dilemma about what pencil to use...

I have 12,5kgs of Nickel steel welding wire ,1.2mm diameter. I need it drawn down to between 0,3-0,5mm to use with my laser welder. It's £1500 a roll, so well worth drawing it down. I could pull it through draw plates, like jewellers do,but I think I might have lost the will to live by the time I am finished....  Doesn't need to be one continuous length, 500mm lengths would be fine.  Just wondering how much you can draw it down in a single pass?  Was also thinking about possibly doing it with rollers.

Enlighten me ...

[Anzaniste]

Memory tells me that we used to reduce high carbon steel wire by 10% in area per pass when I worked in a wiremill. That was drawing through highly polished tungsten carbide dies. After 9 holes (that’s how many there were on the wire drawing machine) the wire would need to be re heat treated or “patented” as it was called. It is nearly 60 years ago so the detail is a bit dim but the key was percentage reduction in area not diameter.
Hope that is of some help.