The Story Of
Forge Mill Needle Museum
Needle Making
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When the
needles had been stamped they were left with excess metal
around the eye of the needle, these were known as the
“flash or splash”. In order to remove the
excess metal the doubles were threaded on to a thin strip
of metal called a “spit”. This was carried out
by “out workers”, usually women and children
that worked from home. They were then held on their spits in “beak nosed clamps” and the flash was ground off. It was at this point that the doubles were broken in to two by hand. This process was called “heading and cheeking” and indeed still is. At this point our needles are perfect but much too soft to use, so they were stacked on metal trays and headed in a furnace to approximately 800 degrees Celsius until they were “cherry red”. Then they were quenched in fish oil. Water had been used for this process up until 1840, but this meant that up to a third of the needles came out bent. The bent needles were known as “crooks”, they would not throw the crooks away, they would all be straightened by hand using a small hammer and an anvil. The straightening was done by women, because the fish oil had been brought in instead of the water these women feared they would lose their jobs and carried out protests, even going as far as burning an effigy of Thomas Dolphin who was a needle hardener who worked for Joseph Turner, the man responsible for bringing in the fish oil. Their protests were however in vain and the fish oil stayed, because there were fewer crooks produced in the hardening process. |
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