When I was talking to Tracey about what she wanted to hold the scroll with, I told her I could make something out of metal in the shape of a U or Y. She thought that was a good idea, and then my wife Terri suggested using antlers.

I asked my daughter about this and she loved the idea (being those would fit right into the renaissance time period) so I dug though my collection and found something I thought would work. After doing some measuring, I think this will work great so I cut them with my bandsaw.
 

I've used antlers for other projects and have used thread inserts to keep them attached. Then it hit me, if I can successfully put threads into wood, then I should be able to do the same with antlers. Why? Because antlers are much harder than wood.
 

These are 1/4-20 bolts along with some 4mm washers. The reason for the metric washers is because they fit the 1/4" bolts without any slop, which is what I wanted. However, both of these are going to need machining so they are proportional for my project.

If you checked out the 'wedding present' that I made earlier, those bolts had square heads. That worked out great because of size of the metal, which was one inch wide. But this project is only 1/2" wide, so the heads on the bolts below are much too big so I'll be machining them.
 

I placed the bolt (threads only) on a parallel with the head just above the vise jaws. Note: The head of the bolt is not resting on the parallel. The parallel also is helping me establish a repeatable surface in the Z axis (up and down) because I'll need to turn the bolt over and machine the opposite side as well.
 

Now it's time to remove the identification on the ends of the bolts. With the end of the bolt against my work stop, I can machine the heads until I have a nice clean surface. This went fast because I didn't need to take much material off.