Forum: scifi.stackexchange.com
Tags: <harry-potter><wandlore>
Title: How do the wand makers get the cores into the wands?
Question: One of the sellers of magic wands, Ollivander, sells wands with Dragon heartstring, Phoenix feather, or Unicorn hair cores in them. What does JKR say about how the wandmakers get the core materials into the wands?

Answers:
sents: text: As far as I know there is no canon reference to how the wandmakers get the core into the actual wood of the wand; J.K. Rowling doesn't address this through Pottermore either.
text: However, I noticed that Ollivander (in the Pottermore links above) references his father 'wrestling' to get the core material into the wand, which would perhaps suggest that the process is difficult.
text: Just as a Harry Potter fan, I would imagine that getting a wand core into a wand is exceedingly difficult and, yes, is a magical process.
text: Too bad it's not detailed further.
text: The second thing I noticed was under unicorn hair.
text: JKR says that the unicorn hair core is most prone to melancholy (meaning it will mope and die if not attended to on occasion) and must be replaced, so clearly there must be a way, by magic and the wandmaker's skill, to remove a wand core and somehow get a second, new wand core into the wand itself.
text: How this happens, though, at this time is unclear.
text: Here's a picture from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One that shows Voldemort holding Lucius Malfoy's wand as it breaks apart.
text: I don't think the movies are considered primary canon by everyone, but this scene is pretty much the same in the book as it is in the movie.
text: The point is that wand woods are not impervious and they can be breached.
answer_details: author: scifi.stackexchange.com/users/3500/Slytherincess
score: 23
sents: text: I always assumed they were made like lead pencils Today, most wooden pencils are mass produced from large blocks of cedar cut into slats.
text: A machine cuts eight grooves, half as deep as the graphite-clay rod is thick, into the slats, and then places rods in each groove.
text: Once the rods are in place, a second grooved slat is glued on top of the first.
text: When the glue dries, the slats are fed through a cutting machine that cuts the wood into various shapes and divides the slats into eight separate pencils.
text: The seams where the two slats are joined are sanded down and several coats of paint are applied to the pencil, giving it the appearance of a solid structure.
text: To make a wand they could just substitute the graphite for whatever material they wanted to use for the core.
answer_details: author: scifi.stackexchange.com/users/1374/Paula
score: 20
sents: text: The same way as a muggle: with specialized tools.
text: One would need to drill carefully in the end of the wand, hollowing it out.
text: Then the "core" would be inserted.
text: Finally, a small cap of wood putty would cover the hole, be sanded down, and then the handle fashioned to hide this.
answer_details: author: scifi.stackexchange.com/users/7603/John O
score: 9
sents: text: I had always assumed from the books that wands were twigs or small branches taken from specific trees.
text: Even some of the pictures show wands as looking something like a carved twig.
text: If this is the case, nearly all the woods named in the books produce pithy twigs.
text: It would be a simple matter to run a wire through the twig, removing the pith, then pulling the core through the interior using string or thin wire.
text: The wand would then be capped at each end and decorated...at least, that's how I always imagined it was done.
text: In fact, when I was a child I used the very same inferred method to make myself a wand with a core of an owl feather :-)
answer_details: author: scifi.stackexchange.com/users/60418/Roland
score: 5
sents: text: We can assume that wands aren't mass produced because there would be no need for so many wands.
text: Wizard usually uses his first wand their entire life so hand-made wands are not much of a stretch.
text: I
text: d say a wand blank must be prepared in advance (long, thin, straight branch without bark and hollowed out).
text: Then inserting material to be aligned with length of wand, and magically sealing it with handle.
text: Perhaps wrestling with it means aligning the core of the wand to sit just right inside of the wand.
answer_details: author: scifi.stackexchange.com/users/13518/agni666
score: 1

Summary of the answers:
There is no reference to how the wandmakers get the core into the actual wood of the wand, however, one would need to drill carefully in the end of the wand, hollowing it out.
The wand would be drilled using specialised tools and put together in the same way as lead pencils, though there is very little available information on the process.