Starting rerooting, breaking pins.

[Mahna]

So some time back I got a set of the Concerned Pony (http://concernedpony.tumblr.com) fakies and ran into an issue when trying to do something to keep her mane from becoming a snarled mess. I like to keep a couple ponies with me when I travel so if I see something cool I can take a picture of with a pony, I never remember to actually do it but that is my excuse for having them and I don't want to use just the molded mane ones. Anyway I was trying to do something with this pony:

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As you can see he original mane is rather lackluster they only used a single line of holes and it wasn't glued in at all. I drilled a second row in alongside the first ones (I had to be really careful as she doesn't have a  single tail hole but like ten holes in a circle and it is really hard to get the glue tip around to her rear) but even after carefully enlarging all the holes I snapped pins about six times for maybe 24 roots. In the end it looked better as you can see, but the hardest part was constantly cutting new needles as they are as hard as my sidecutters (I think I groved the jaws on my cutters).

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Is there a trick I should know? What size needles are the best?

I have a bunch of ponies and a growing collection of monster high dolls I want to reroot and face up but I would prefer to not have to cut a couple dozen needles with every doll.

[Raindrop]

It may be the size of your needle, but it could also be cheap needles.  I had a batch once that I had to throw out because the metal was ridiculously brittle.

[aintnobuffalo]

Are you creating your own needles? I can't see the pics to be sure of what is going on, but I would second Raindrop's comment.

[Mahna]

Yeah I was cutting my own, I tried using a couple I found with longer eyes in a needle pack (one of those round ones with like five to six different sizes) in the end I just started using the ones at work in the quick fix kits we have (I work at a hotel so we have tons of them) but they are hard to get a decent amount of hair into.

I have multiple pin drills so I don't have to keep switching between needle and drill if I need to expand a root hole but I just went through so many pins for such a small amount of roots that I wonder if there is something wrong with the pin size or type I was using.