Hobby shops may have large wooden beads A sphere with a central hole ready drilled that you can widen if needed to take a horse hair plume or just to fit securely on the spike.
I may be able to do that as well..., but it'll come from the hobby shop. I was disappointed today to find out that my local hardware store no longer carries spherical wooden drawer knobs...
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Alright. So while I resolve he eagle issue, I have taken it upon myself to whittle a spike out of wood. I also found an interesting artefact which might help top dress up the small aluminium finial, but I'll leave that for later.
I found a handrail baluster post, a simple bar of wood made from Cedar, about 1-1/2 inches on each side of the square in size. The wood is extremely light, and reminds me of Balsa wood , but it's much tougher than balsa wood. I started by outlining the shape of the finial I wanted. Basically I wanted a finial which looked like the cast iron finial. Due to the size of the bar, the finial would have to be thinner.
I used a box cutting retractable knife to make the cuts. Not the thin variety! That would be dangerous, but rather, the large double width type. Why? because the blades are sharp and flexible, like a pairing knife. This is important to achieve the curved cuts without breaking the blade while you whittle.
Since I didn't have a French Curve, I used a kitchen knife as a stencil. The blade's curve was suitable to copy the shape of the iron finial...
In order to make the 3D cuts, I outlined the entire piece from all sides with a pencil. The idea is to try to preserve the pencil marks as much as possible during the cutting, so as to ensure one can keep the proper proportions. The easy thing to do is cut at 45 degrees from the faces of the bar,, taking the "corners" of the material off.
Then one can start cutting material from the faces of the wood block. This means half of the pencil marks will disappear, so we will have to re draw them later.
The finial starts taking shape, and then, when one has to cut the other two sides, one must use a stencil again to redraw the lines (projection onto a slanted surface), and then continue cutting:
At which point you have a finial. The cuts consumed three blades of the retractable knife, but the knife didn't break in the process.
The biggest problem I had was achieving a sharp edge in the interface between the long concave surface and the short concave surface. The wood was so soft it kept splitting there. The pointy end of the finial, however was no problem because the tip was in the direction of the blade, it was just like sharpening a giant pencil. So what I did to cover my mistakes was to dull that edge and drill a series of holes along that edge. I also provided a "waviness" to the edge to simulate a rough cast metal piece, similar to the uneven edges in the cast iron finial.
I'm not sure how this is going to look in the end, but this is the best I can do with the tools I have. I can apply a lot of sanding to smooth surfaces, but the hand cut surfaces will not be perfect. I simply don't have the way to make them perfect, but then again, the cast iron finial was not perfect either. Now I'm wondering whether I should add some texture to the surface to emulate the roughness of the iron finial, and perhaps hide the small imperfections in the surface.
After cutting, I beveled the holes a bit with a dremel and made the bevel outline oval in shape. That also helps hide imperfections in the positioning of the holes
The finial is light as a feather- even lighter than the aluminium finial. But it's as tall as the iron finial:
And this is what it looks like on the hat:
I'm a bit ambivalent about it. I'd like the finial to be a bit more finished, but outside of sanding, I don't think it'll get much straighter than that...
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I'll be ordering a second eagle from eBay tonight. I inquired with the Chinese seller on AliExpress. He told me the item was "still in transit" and extended my right to complain by 20 more days :/ I'm not waiting.