Thank you.
Here's how I made the hooks. I tried with some sort of jig, trying to bend the wire around sewing needles inserted in a piece of wood. But at that small size this didn't work.
So back to round pliers. I did grind the ends of the conical jaws down. One jaw to a really small diameter and the other left a little thicker.
So first I bend the wire around the pointy end, no need to be precise...
Then with a flush trim cutter I snip off about halfway in the bent part. This will give you a nice round part to close the loop properly. This is actually how eyelets are done in electronics...
And reinserting the pointy end continue to close the loop.
Grab the "shaft" as close to the loop as possible and bend it up:
So you have this:
The next parts are difficult to photograph. With the thicker jaw I bend the wire back a little before forming the hook around the thinner jaw. I try to not bend it too far do avoid closing the hook part too far.
Now to create the sharp, pointy end of the hook and cut the wire at the same time I simply grab it at the desired spot, squeeze the wire to make an indent and wiggle the overlength a couple times while pulling until it snaps off by itself.
Another way of creating the pointy end is to snip it off at a flat angle but I kept breaking off the fine point...
This pic I took right after the wire did break After this some hooks need a little finetuning.
A quick flattening in the pliers
At this point you could twist the eyelet to be perpendicular to the hook.
So this is the smallest I can make the, they are 4mm long. The wire is 0,5mm diameter brass wire. Maybe you could go smaller by using 0,3mm but then the hooks would be too flimsy and maybe open up during rigging.
With this method I can do one hook (without the finetuning) in about 45sec. Just have to switch pliers 2 times so after a few tries you can be pretty fast.
They are still nowhere near as good as I have seen in other peoples' logs but turned out OK. I think it is more important to be closer to scale than having the shape exactly correct.
So respect to those modellers who can do both
