Playing with a bit of antler...

[Landy_Dom]

and made the toggle and needle pictured below

Thanks for looking!

Dom.

 

[cheapeats]

How do you remove material to shape the needle? Do you carve it with a blade or grind it off with something?

 

[Toddy]

Oh neat

cheers,
Toddy

 

[Landy_Dom]

The toggle is drilled to 4mm, the needle to 2mm. Both are countersunk slightly with a larger drill bit (by hand, not spun in the drill). The needle was fashionned 90% with a 1" 2nd cut file and finished with a half round needle ( ! ) file. both were finished off with wire wool. The blank for the needle was split from about a 1/2" section with a hand axe (put the axe blade upwards on a chopping block (held by the missus) and put the antler on the blade and tap with a hammer - effective and safe. The splitting was very random - not as much of a grain as I had expected - it split off at all sorts of angles.

 

[Bernie Garland]

Neat bit of work Dom i'll send you down some socks for darning

Bernie

 

[gregorach]

Yeah, good stuff - but I'm not sure about how practical the needle is. The wide bit that the eye passes through isn't going to go neatly through the hole made by the point.

When I've made antler needles, what I've done is to score out a blank between about 2 and 4mm wide from the side of a round piece of antler, then split it off from the core. Then scrape / file it down to the right size and shape. Putting the eye is is the tricky bit - I generally file the eye end down so that I've got two flat sides, locate the eye by twisting in the point of a knife, and then very carefully open it up by scraping. The smallest needle I've made this way has a diameter of about 1mm - certainly a lot more fragile than a modern steel needle, but surprisingly robust nonetheless.