Pinning questions

[Hammers]

That might be an interesting theory to investigate, were it not for the case that both China and India are both squarely in the Northern Hemisphere, just like us.

You are making a fool out of yourself, Plynkes. They are obviously too far away to be with us here in Northern Hemisphere. Stands to reason.

[Doug.Sundseth]

If you're going to make spears and pikes out of music wire, you'll need a dedicated hardened wire cutter. (I suspect the links others have given you will be just fine.) I have one of those, but I no longer see any value in using music wire for spears, pikes, or pins.

Any more I only use mild steel (usually straightened paper clips) or brass. For weapons, I typically use brass. When using a softer wire like these, nearly any diagonal cutter will be just fine, though I would not ever recommend using a sprue cutter for any sort of wire.

Another advantage of brass for weapons is that you can grind on a point, then crush the pointy end of the wire with flat-jawed pliers and get a very passable leaf-shaped blade (especially in 15mm).

HTH

[Hammers]

If you're going to make spears and pikes out of music wire, you'll need a dedicated hardened wire cutter. (I suspect the links others have given you will be just fine.) I have one of those, but I no longer see any value in using music wire for spears, pikes, or pins.

While you can't solder piano wire (with electronics type soldering) you can heat and make malleable it.

I wrote a thesis about miniforges some years ago:

http://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=30009.0