There's a reason why there are only a few wandmakers, I'd like to think wandmaking is a secret art passed down from master to apprentice and you'd have to study and practice it for most of your life and adding knowledge of Ancient Rites and Rituals to know the correct combination of wood and core and how to properly bond them.
I think wandmakers use arithmancy and runes for bonding too. It would be nice to know more about other possible cores and what kind of wands they'd make.

 

I kind of imagined Wandcrafting like this...

Wandcraft: Story Mode

Young wizard Harry, his friends Ron and Hermione and a team of other students enter a wandcrafting competition, which Hogwarts has lost every year since Ollivander, master wandmaker, has been in school, but is being held at Hogwarts for the first time in a quarter of a century. Despite this, the trio manage to bulid an impressive contraption which Hogwarts member Malfoy, who hates Harry, angrily sabotages so that he can get credit for his own wand in the competition. No one has proof that Malfoy has done the deed, however, and when Harry goes after him his professor Hagrid stops him, then convincing Harry to gather wood from a particular thicket in the Forbidden forest in order to craft an even better wand.

Hermione doesn't like the idea, fearing that it's too dangerous and they could be caught by the caretaker on their way out of the castle. Hagrid realizes that they could have been breaking the rules of the competition and immediately regrets telling them about the forest, especially as Harry just seems more upset in the wake of Malfoy's sabotage. Ron, however, sneaks off with Fang in the night to find the wood, such is his determination to pay Malfoy back.

Harry tosses and turns in the night and when he casts Lumos he finds that Ron is gone but has left him a note as to his whereabouts. Harry consults Hermione, Hagrid and sets off after his friend along with his owl Hedwig, who circles the treetops looking for Ron. Hagrid guides them to the thicket, but they find it has been overran with Acromantulas though they see Fang, slightly limping, alongside a torn piece of Ron's clothing and a thin trail of blood leading into caves. Hermione wants to turn back for help but Hagrid and Harry agree that Ron could be dead by then, and the three of them move in the caves.

<fighting acromantulas> <building a sweet wand out of a special tree> <emasculating Malfoy>

 

I love wandlore, I made a whole little document with every single thing I could find on the creation of wands as well as my own head cannons. As far as I an tell it's that the wood has to be enchanted or naturally magical in the same way as a human can be magical as a wizard.

Cores are different though, cores can be from anything it's just that the more magical the creature is the better it is and the three cores are some of the most powerful while having a fairly even temperament. I always assumed other cores were eaither to rare or too temperamental for olivander to use, and other people have been said to be more experimental in their cores.

The core doesn't realy have to be given willingly though, does it? As dragon heartstring doesn't sound like something that could be given willingly from a semi-bestial being does it?

In any case I only came back to discuss something else bit this caught my eye. I might go back here and deal more out on my personal head cannons s I'm sure we all can say that it is most of what we can realy say about the subject.

 

I imagine the build process is simple, transfigure the wood to water, stick the core material (feather, heartstring etc.) in the middle, reverse the transfiguration. Maybe add a little bit of some kind of bonding potion at some point. Well, simple if you know what to do.

 

I've always felt that in far too many stories, personalized wand-crafting is shown to to take place on an extremely small timescale, to the point that it consistently breaks immersion for me. I would think that such a valuable and powerful artifice would surely take a week to craft... So I guess I'd say that I've always pictured wand making as a slow, careful process, somehow involving potions and maybe alchemy.

 

A week? Honestly I think it would take lot longer. You would have to gather all the needed materials(specific wood, specific core) and then you craft the wand. And even then there's a chance it doesn't fit you at all. Or maybe wands which are crafted by someone always work for that person?

 

I always felt that, and this seems to be confirmed with recent things about American wand makers, wand making was something like any other kind of woodcarving. This seems to be confirmed by the cabinetmakers son who became a wand maker, carrying over skills. I also figured makeing a wand takes a long time, about a week of dedicated work. Not to mention materials, but in the old days you would get materials from the person who commissioned the wand or you would have msterial on you.

 

I think wandcrafting (and broom making) are part of the wizarding worlds industrialization process. With that in mind if we not only accept canon but a greater world there exists a difference for me between personally crafted, shelf, and mix wands.

So in my head at the beginning of wand or staff lore everybody build his/her own wand or at least had a family member/ neighbor do it.
Therefore exist thousands of methods or variations that a person could use.

Idea one (for personal wand): seven pieces of a tree planted on your birthday that got watered with seven drops of blood for the next seven years bound together via ritual on your 21 birthday with three braided tail hairs of your familiar mount.
Result: real Personal and probably powerful wand.
Downsides : blood magic and rituals may be illegal, your familiar has no tail hair and you are screwed, try and sell something that works only for you, etc

Idea two (shelf wand): wood from the forbidden forest, stone henge or a other magical place will be carved it in form hollowed out. The dragon heartstring core is bought in a Romanian reserve. Both get put together, closed with a handle and swim seven days in a potion.
Result: shelf wand that anybody could use with nearly identical results.
Downsides: it reacts to every magic equally bad, no wand for children that are just learning magic, probably worth less than the cost of the ingredients

To get back to topic I think the shelf wand meaning those made by Ollivander, Gregorovitch and the lesser known wandcrafter are the results of trial and error that got taught from master to apprentice and refined till "today". To complete this thought I think every wandmaker has his/her own way of building wands, ideas from fanfictions are enough out there and my preferred method changes depending on the story.

The question that still remains is now why does not everybody have a personal wand ?
Let`s compare wands to cars, you can buy a Rolce Royce Phantom ( Ollivanders ), a Mercedes SLS (Gregorovitch), a Toyota Corolla (wandmaker XYZ) or you build a car in your Garage. The problem with the Garage car is you search for parts or build them yourself, spend time and money for two Rolce Royce and the result could be your personal dream car or a death trap. In this example mixed wands are mods from body kits to Brabus

 

(Edit: So I started out writing a reply and ended up with an essay. Sorry, I guess?)

Everybody keeps tossing out methods which involve esoteric and obscure magical methods, most of which are fanon (at least as methods of spellcasting), like blood rituals and arithmancy and ancient runes, and I think everybody is missing the point. This is kind of a gripe of mine with the HP fandom: JKR likes to mix and match elements from fantasy and mythology, but a lot of the fandom forgets that while she draws inspiration from the portrayals of magic in other works, she also intentionally doesn't render them faithfully. A pretty big, recurring theme in the books is that things are never as they seem on the surface, which we see with all the characters who seem good but turn out to be evil (Pettigrew, Quirrell, fake-Moody, etc) and also all the characters who seem evil but turn out to be good (Sirius, Snape, Regulus, Snape again later on, etc), and - most importantly to this discussion - with all the times popular tropes of fantasy settings are deliberately subverted.

For example: house elves, which subvert the tall and beautiful modern fantasy elf we have all seen in LotR by instead being based on an older elf more akin to the ones we are familiar with from Santa's workshop. Or, more relevantly, broomsticks: rakido mentioned them in the context of industrialization vs hand-crafting, and I think they're central to this discussion, but I actually think they prove the opposite.

Every year, it seems, there is a new broom. In just the years when Harry is at school, we see first the Nimbus 2000, and then the Nimbus 2001, and then the Firebolt, all each within a year of each other - by the time the 2014 Quidditch World Cup rolls around, people are flying around on no joke Starsweeper XXI's and Firebolt Supremes.

What does this tell us? Well, first, it tells us that methods of magical toolcrafting improve with the passage of time. Brooms get faster and more agile, wands get more powerful and easy-to-use. For reference, one can also check Ollivander's notes: you will notice that he did not settle upon the three cores and many woods chosen due to uncovering ancient methods or observing the arithmantic properties of dragon dung, but rather through extensive experimentation and hard work. This is part of another fantasy subversion, although this one is more thematic in nature: it is a common trope that all the powerful magic was lost to the ages, and HP plays with the idea that all the most powerful magic is also all the oldest magic (see: love), but at the same time it seems that none of this is ever truly forgotten, not to anybody who cares to know it. Voldemort might scoff at love, but Dumbledore recognizes its power, and there's a whole room in the Department of Mysteries devoted to researching it, because in Harry Potter magic also improves over time. Dumbledore discovered twelve uses of dragon's blood, while Damocles Belby invented the Wolfsbane potion and Snape developed many useful innovations of his own in Hogwarts. For all that it is a staple of Wizarding education, the levitation charm had not yet been invented when Hogwarts was founded, and apparently until Miranda Goshawk came around, it wasn't even taught in very good textbooks.

This also tells us, though, that personal crafting is inferior to the store-bought product. This is wildly different from the real world, where NASCAR cars are painstakingly handmade and carefully tuned to be just right for their drivers. In Harry Potter, every single member of the Brazilian team rides a Varápidos, and they fucking like it, too. These are competitive athletes willing to fly around at hundreds of miles an hour and risk serious injuries for the sake of winning (huge stacks of galleons); if making their own brooms were even slightly more likely to give them an edge, they'd make their own goddamn brooms. That they don't is a very important detail: it means that, no matter how you make your own wand, you'll probably never make one as good as Ollivander or Gregorovitch does, not even for yourself. Why else would Voldemort, dark and powerful wizard extraordinaire, continue to use the Yew wand he bought in a store when he was eleven, right up until it found its literal match in Harry's?

Now, despite all this, is wandcrafting still very esoteric? Yes. But the mysteries of wands are most commonly referenced not with respect to a wand's creation, but rather with respect to its properties - wandlore, in other words, is more mystifying than wandmaking. Ollivander didn't have to look up how to make a wand, or invent new methods of making them; his dad was making wands before he was born. Sure, each wandmaker has their own industry secrets, but when we look at where Ollivander directed the majority of his research, we find that he looked most closely into things like which materials are best, or how certain wands match better or worse with certain people.

So, although we don't really know how wands are made, I'm willing to make a few bets right now:
1) Each wandmaker has their own methods and trade secrets, but by and large there isn't a terrible amount of variation in terms of the creation process itself.
2) Rather, the majority of the distinction between Ollivander and other wandmakers comes from their choice and understanding of the materials used, as well as which wand best suits which wizard. If Ollivander handed a rookie wandmaker all the necessary materials, the rookie could make a fairly good wand out of them, but the rookie would have no clue why those items were best, nor whom to give the wand to.
3) Because of this, the process by which wands are made must be simple enough that a muggleborn like Johannes Jonker can pick it up and become one of the best in his country, without needing any ancestry in wand-making or special esoteric techniques to be passed down to him.
4) Wands cannot be crafted personalized, because they are already personalized and it is not under your control: "The wand chooses the wizard." Crafting a wand for yourself is akin to the wizard choosing the wand. The most one could do is make a wand with a temperament such that it can potentially align to anybody - much like the Elder Wand, which affixes itself to the strongest individual it finds.
5) Ollivander must create wands at least at the same rate that people buy them. Given that around 40 children purchase wands per year, and that at least ten or so adults probably require replacements, we'll say that a wand needs to be craftable in at most a week. However, seeing as Ollivander has rows upon rows of wands, and needs to always have enough to ensure that a perfect match exists for every person to walk into his shop, we can safely say that (given the appropriate materials) it probably does not take more than 2-4 days to make a high-quality wand.

If I had to take a guess, I'd say that the wandmaker receives a shipment of wood and cores each month, and then carefully selects items of the proper temperament and pairs them in effective combinations. The crafting itself is relatively simple; after over 2000 years of innovation, there are no doubt a few spells and potions devised for the sole purpose of making the carving of wand woods and insertion of cores as easy and efficient as possible. Finished products are boxed carefully and placed on shelves. Some wandmakers, usually lesser ones, allow people to peruse and select their own wand, but this generally leads to people choosing the prettiest wood and not the best fit. Others, like Ollivander, painstakingly search for wands which match the personality of the user, and continue match-making until a wand fits perfectly.

(END ESSAY)

 

I find a few points of contention with the essay above, and I want to address them. The most obvious to me being that olivander is one of the only Wanamaker's that does the wand choosing the wizard thing, and for most of history and most other wand makers the wand is made specifically for them.

Another point I would like to say is yes, the materials are what makes the wand. You need to make it out of magical wood, bowtruckles are useful for this, but it's obviously possible that they magic can apear in all woods as it does with wizards. The same thing can be said about cores, all cores are basically the same: some sort of source of magic taken from a magical creature.

The more magical the creature, the more powerful the wand, and sometimes the more temperamental when made with materials from more temperamental magical creatures. The way I think about it is thusly, olivander has settled on his three cores because they have three things going for them: they are abundant, they are powerful, and they are relatively less temperamental hen say a... Vela wand.

That's not to say their arnt materials that can match them, just not in his area, and while I don't expect him to cut out a dragon heartstring himself I beleive he must be critical of each material that comes through his door and I believe fulheartedly he finds his own wand trees.

Across the pond in America we confirmed several things. First that the magic is taken from the beast: see the SPINE of an offending monster. Secondly, it tells us that cores from immensely magical creatures we have been using in fannon wands for years, see Thunderbird, do work and perhaps to the same level as similar counterparts... their just not available to olivander easily and he is someone who finds it easy to become set in his ways unlike hid counterpart gregogavich... or whatever his name is. And finally third, it seems that wand makeing I'd a type of wood crafting, as their is painstaking details put in specifically to say that one of the wand makers was the son of a wood worker and used that experience in his wand making.

In all honestly I still intend to make stories about a wand maker, and perhaps the absolutely terrible self insert I tried to write a while back, as soon as we get real info on ilvermorny. I love wand lore, potion bruing, and animagi magic... it seems I don't realt belong in a European school, perhaps and ilvermorny student with transfer programs with the African and south American one.

In any case, I think at this point it seems obvious that any wood and any magical creature could create a wand, which creates credence to my sandlewood, Sphinx whisker wand, or my kitsune whisker wand, or pooka tail hair. These materials could all fit in the mantle just as well as any of them, perhaps better then river monster spine. The reason we don't have a bunch of things like bascalisk cores or anything like that is just because they are so rare.

Also, not realt a point in the previous patch, but I think it's interesting that we now know about newt having a dual core wand, bone and shel, this lends a little but of credence for alot of fannon.

(I know what you mean, I almost want to go and make a thread just on wand cores and how they work. And what fan ones would or wouldn't work.)

 

On the timing of wand manufacture: I agree that Ollivander probably produces 50-100 wands per year to sustain his stock, but I believe he can work on more than one wand at a time with several in different stages of preparation and manufacture. On average he gets one or two wands finished per week, but the actual process ought to take a month. If you add in associations between astonomy/astrology and the proper timing of working with certain woods, it can be a very complicated matter.

Whatever you choose to do with your process, however, I think there should be reasons why they are done they way they are, and limitations created when the procedure isn't followed.

 

Jeez, did you write this on your phone?

While you do raise a good point that wands were crafted for people on request before Ollivander came along, I think you're forgetting that this was by and large and inferior method. From Pottermore:

Think Hermione's wand when Harry used it. It worked, sure, but it hadn't chosen him, so his original one was undeniably better.

And I don't think anything else you said in your post directly addressed anything in mine. I mean, I dislike specific elements of fanon, but I don't think it's inherently flawed or entirely wrong, and I didn't say anything about there only being three wand cores in my post. Not that you're right about all of what you said (The existence of fanon elements in canon does not actually make the rest of fanon more valid, and there's definitely more to wands than just a 2-dimensional graph of power and volatility), but mostly I just don't care.

 

Actually yeah did write it on my phone. And yeah, I know that it was a somewhat interior method but I don't think it's as bad as using someone else's wand, see the Vila wand.

From what I remeber I thought that at least a portion of olivander hype for his method was because he wrote it. And what I ment was more four dimensional thing of power, amiability, availability, and sometimes the connection to the person.

 

I've had various thoughts on wandlore. I personally always scoff whenever I read a scene where you hover your hand over a piece of wood and you feel 'just' right. While I suppose it is possible for a person like Olivander to while his day away while making wand and then let children try out hundreds for just the right one, I believe if you were to custom make a wand there would be a certain

I believe that there should be a certain amount of introspection involved in creating a wand custom fit for a certain person. I somewhat liken it to the process of animagi, you must know yourself intimately before you are able to accurately pick out what wood or core would fit for you. After you have torn your personality apart, you can then decide upon which wood and core fit you the best.

After that comes the process of harvesting, I'd like to think that the way you go about getting the materials would affect the way the wand works. For example; say you wanted a wand aligned to dark magic, you wouldn't ask the animal for a tail feather, you would shoot of a petrificus at it and forcefully take it, or in the case of dragon heartstrings defile the grave of a dragon (assuming magic keeps it from decaying) and take it, considering it isn't probable that many wizards can take on a dragon.

There's my take on wand crafting, I apologize if my opinion has horrible butchered anything that strictly contradicts it in actual canon.

 

I forgot the part where "dark magic" equaled "necromancy", it seems

 

I've always imagined one of the most important parts of wand crafting are how the ingredients were gathered, e.g. Willingly, dead/alive, forcibly taken etc. (at least in regards to the core, no idea about the wood) I think how they are gathered might dictate what kind of magic they are good at and things like length and flexibility reflect this suiting different kinds of magic. Also personality could also be tied into this.

The actual crafting I've always imagined as a spell where the wood/core are combined where using a mental component the crafter decides things like length/flexibility.

And then as to how the wands are matched with people, I believe magic has an 'inner personality' that needs to match with the wand.

Finally I think theres no way to easily match a wand with people and crafters like Ollivander just keep on handing out wands until they match.

 

Wand woods have to be from magic trees, the kind the bowtruckles like.