>>And it should be copper, is
: that right?

Pygmy kits use dark stovepipe wire, made of iron or steel. It gets on your hands, but works fine. Since it's stronger than copper, 16-gauge or even finer should work well: might be easier to insert in 1/16-inch holes (the Pygmy standard), etc. The smaller diameter makes removing the stitches easy. We never needed to heat the wires when building our Tern 14; just cut the bridging piece with diagonal pliers and pulled on the twists with regular pliers. Worked great.

Hope this helps. Good luck on your project! You'll be glad you did it.

--SF