As promised i said i would give twists a whole page of there own, and there is good reason for that. Mass produce twists can be bought in welded into a panel quickly and easy, very labour saving. in fact i can buy a twisted bar that is continually twisted that is 3mtrs long. But when you make your own twists you can control a lot of factors that make the twists look different.
Usually when i refer to a twist, it might be a 250/8. or a 500/16 for example, that just simply means the first number is the length of the twist, so 250mm or 500mm but the second number refers to the number of quarter turns. (Why quarter turns, because its square and has 4 sides, so a single quarter turn will oriented the same way at both ends.) so if you are making 6 quarter turns over 250mm, it will look exactly the same in terms of how the spiral twists as a 500mm with 12 quarter turns, after all you have just doubled the length, so need to double the number of turns in it.
So what happens if you don’t double the number of turns but double the length, well then you get a much more “lazy” twist, it turns slower over a longer distance, this changes the appearance of a twist. In facts its very easy to see if i have been running a batch of twists and mis counted by 1 as it just looks very different, So you can use this difference in a design.. As we usually have a centre bar on most designs, your centre twist could be a 250/8 and then the next twist could be a 250/4 then swapping back to a 250/8 on the next twist, repeating until you run out of bars. You can do the same with the length of twist as well, lets say a 400/8 as a centre then the next twist along as a 300/6. the spiral will have the same look but the length of twist will be different.. I have a twisting tool that requires brute strength and is capable of twisting 12mm square cold, when twisting, i always turn the handle clockwise, but if you turn counter clockwise, you end up with the spiral going in the reverse direction. This again can be used in a design with alternate forward and reverse twists
Twists are usually in the centre of the bar, but that doesn’t have to be the case, again here with just off setting the twists from the centre you can create a wavy type pattern just using simple twists, to be fair that can also be created using cages, C scrolls or even bars with circles welded in