Eighteen inches of 20-gauge sterling just came off the coil. What did it cost?
Pick the gauge, the shape, and the metal, put in what you paid, and get grams per inch, feet per troy ounce, and the metal cost in any length. Everything stays in your browser.
The wire
The numbers here are yours to check. This page does arithmetic on what you type — it cannot see your recipe, your equipment or your batch.
Want it to remember?
In MadeKeeper, every piece logs the wire inches it consumed at their real weight and cost, so your inventory, your true piece cost, and the price suggestion all move together off the same coil. See for metalsmiths or poke around the live demo. $19/mo for the whole back office, kept for as long as you stay. The shop stays free for cost a piece and one fair — no product cap. The tax packet, Etsy and Square, and more fairs are the $19.
Free calculator · Wirework, chainmaille & metalsmithing
Four questions that come up at the bench, answered with the same arithmetic the calculator runs.
How much does 18 inches of 20-gauge sterling weigh, and what does it cost?
20 AWG works out to 0.81 mm across, which in round sterling is about 0.136 grams per inch — so an 18-inch bracelet carries roughly 2.45 grams of wire. If your coil ran $1.20 a gram, that's about $2.94 of metal in the piece before findings. The same math says a troy ounce of that wire is roughly 19 feet, which is handy when the receipt prices by the ounce and your design thinks in inches.
Does it matter that my wire is square instead of round?
Quite a bit. Square wire at the same gauge carries more metal — a square cross-section is the full d² where round is only π/4 of it, so square runs about 27% heavier per inch, and half-round is half the round weight. That's why shape is a picker on this calculator instead of an assumption: the same gauge number can weigh out three different ways depending on what's actually on the coil.
Why do I have to type in my own price — can't the calculator just use the silver price?
Because the number that matters is what you paid, not what the market says today. Spot moves daily, and the price on your receipt depends on more than the metal — fabrication, coil size, and the supplier all shape it. So price is a setting you own, entered per gram or per troy ounce (converted at 31.1035 grams to the ounce), and the answer is your cost off your receipt, not a market estimate that's already stale.
I weave prototypes in copper — how do I price the sterling version?
Same gauge and shape means the same volume of metal per inch, so only the density changes: copper runs 8.94 g/cm³ against sterling's 10.36. Multiply your copper weight by 10.36 ÷ 8.94 — about 1.16 — and you have the sterling weight, then apply your sterling price to that. Or skip the multiplying and run the piece through the calculator twice, once in each metal.