Bodkin. That's brilliant. Damn. I'm off the keyboard and back to the vise right now.
Ok. 15 minutes later. The bodkin for installing 3mm mini eyes is a game changer.
I love it. This one is 3/4" inch long. I'll get it down to 1/2" long soon. I'm working on it.
Note too: The stick-on goo on the back of the eyes barely holds. You need resin of some kind. Thick UV resin would probably work. I tried CA glue. ZapAGap dissolved what little stick the eyes naturally had and the eyes fell off. But thicker yet CA glue from Ace Hardware did the trick.
Put on a drop of thick CA glue and then breath on it to kick it off. Or use accelerator. These side feather bodies are hard to position well--in conjunction with stick on eyes. I might go back to fibers of some kind. Maybe even bucktail like a Thunder Creek. This one is new off my vise but I have been fishing micro streamers for a decade now. It's big (Bill Blackburn) medicine for me.
Bill has a story I'm not at liberty to completely tell, about fishing a Southwest Montana spring creek with two fishing industry luminaries whose names I can't use. Only Bill can do that. The gist of it was they got skunked using pheasant-tail and copper nymphs while Bill wack'em silly using tiny tiny Thunder Creek Minnows. On a spring creek when it was hot and sunny and everybody else had the idea "They aren't feeding now."
I think these 3mm stick on eyes are as small as they need to be. Baby trout fry are a lot like a pair of eyeballs with a bit of clear goo attached.