needle for bolstering knuckles??

[Susan Kline]

The class was Guy Nichols', in Chicago. I wrote it up for the Journal, 
since it
had a lot of interesting ideas. I'm still looking for the needles he had, too.
They had sort of notches in place of the usual eye, so one could just pull a
thin piece of cloth into them from the rear, instead of having the thread it.
He used a thin bushing cloth strip 1/8" wide, or a little less.

Susan

At 09:33 PM 7/16/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>List,
>
>I recently discovered that by bolstering the knuckles on a well-worn grand 
>action, I can avoid all that capstain turning and let-off rail raising 
>that I hate to do!  I've been using a modified darning needle to pull a 
>2mm wide strip of bushing cloth through the knuckles.  The foldover at the 
>eye is very difficult to pull through, and it stretches the buckskin more 
>than I'd like.  In Chicago, one of the instructors (if I could remember 
>who, I would contact him individually) described a flat needle with some 
>kind of clip to grip the end of the action cloth, that he uses for knuckle 
>bolstering.  He called it a glovers needle, and said the supply houses 
>carry them.  Well, the supply house glovers needles are triangular 
>cross-section voicing needles, aren't they?  So does anyone know what this 
>flat needle is really called, and where I can get one?
>
>thanks,
>
>Mike Spalding, RPT