Photo Guide to Imping

[Jay]

I did this up for the International forum, but its a good thing to have so im throwing it here as well.

This is my meathod and it works extreamly well, though I am sure there are others. In the pics I substituted a dental drill for a small nail as I couldnt find my bag of drills and I was to lazy to use glue. For glue 5min epoxy or hot glue can be used, but I have found fly tying head cement to work extreamly well.


You will need. A bird with a broken feather, a replacement feather that has been molted, a harris hawk tail feather to be made into a pin, glue or some sort, an exacto knife, and a dental drill.




Aline the molted feather over the broken one so that the bottom of the molted feather is even with others in the area. Now cut the molted feather where the broken one ends.




Take the dental drill and hollow out the inside of both the cut feather that will be attached and the broken one on the bird so that a pin can be inserted into both.




Now take the Harris Hawk feather and cut a pin that will fit inside both the broken shaft and the new cut one that you just hollowed out.




Insert this pin into the shaft of the broken feather. Then take the new feather and inserit it on the other end of the pin. If it all fits you can start to glue. If not work on it untill you have a good fit.

If the pin fit glue the pin into the broken feather.




Now put some glue on the other end of the pin and attach the new feather.




If you did it right it should look like this.

[alex2]

What about just using a toothpick?
I dont have any harris hawk feathers handy

[Ooby]

go to an asian restaurant and get some chop sticks. the oriental food places around here use bamboo chopsticks and bamboo will work a lot better than a toothpick.

Also another good finishing touch is to take the shaft of an old feather, strip all the feathering off of it and find a section that is the same size as the imped feather where the break is. Cut off a small section and split it in half so that you can glue each half on one side of the break. This will make the imping stronger and less likely to bend/break.

[Ramka]

We use sometime steel nails without heads suitable diametr and lenght for tail, or big crimped paper-clips for primaries. It work well for us.

[SkyRider]

Well Jay, let me be the first to thank you for putting this up on our little homely forum here. Good explanations and nice photos.

[manok]

I have heard of guitar strings & piano wire being used.

[alex2]

We Imped one of my Sponsers Saker falcons on Friday,
I asked him why we cut the feather at the base and he said because otherwise it stays weak and can break again.

So we basically do the same thing except we cut the stick to the size of the hollow shaft and cut it and glue at the base.

[Jay]

Ya you should cut up near the base and use a longer needle. I didnt in the pictures because I would have need to use a section of the HH feather that I would use on the bird. Just decided not to waste it.