![]() ![]() Having a tool that has the right proportion (harmonics) to the work you are doing really helps. If you give that surface a new grind and smooth it out, you should find that flaking improves.ĭepending on how much flintknapping you plan to do, you might want more than one billet. In fact, as you use your billet, it will start to get pitted up and irregular on its surface when this occurs, you will find it harder to make the flakes you want. The base is the striking end of the billet, and you want it to be smooth and regular to allow clean contact with your biface when flaking with it. Use a flake to chop off the ring of little knobs around the base of the antler, and then grind it smooth all the way around. It took me 36 minutes to saw this groove, using three flakes and resharpening two of them twice. Incise a deep notch all the way around antler, then tap it on a rock and snap the antler in half. How long you make you make the billet is kind of a personal choice, though if it has a longer handle, that adds more mass to it-and in most cases that can’t hurt. Then I will show how to grind your billet down to a good working shape. Here’s how I cut up a mule deer antler with flakes. I have also noticed you can purchase cut-up antler pieces in some pet stores, where they are sold as dog chew-toys. You can obtain pre-made antler tools on the Internet there are quite a few websites that sell flintknapping tools, traditional and modern. You can find them out hiking in the forest yourself, of course, but you might have to cover lots of ground before you find some. I have mule deer, moose, and elk in my kit. One of the flakes I used to cut the base off There are various sizes of grain in these stones, and I like to keep a coarser-grained stone in my kit for some of my platform preparation work (though the coarser-grained stones do seem to wear out a bit faster). Softer stone also has enough grit to function very well as an edge abrader for beveling edges and preparing platforms. Using a softer stone for flaking yields fewer split flakes and cores. This sandstone is a relatively soft stone that crushes a bit, but is perfect for flintknapping. When selecting a stone for flintknapping, you want a stone that is not itself flakeable. I prefer somewhat oval to round in shape. Cobbles come in a variety of useful sizes and shapes. They are tumbled sandstone that comes out of the Santa Rita Mountains south of Tucson. I gather my favorite pecking (hammer) stones from the Santa Cruz River bed here in Tucson. Two sandstone cobbles out of the Santa Cruz River bed The second tine from the left has been ground into a spatula shape and is great for notching arrowheads and projectile points. The other two tools are made out of the tine end of the deer antler, and I use them for pressure flaking. This billet is based on ones we find in Early Agricultural sites in the Tucson Basin. It is a particularly small billet, yet great for final percussion flaking on small dart points. The tool just left of the pecking stone is called a billet, and I made it out of the base of a mule deer antler. I could get by with only this tool, but the antler tools are critical for making really fine points. The most important tool in this set is the small, red sandstone pecking stone/hammerstone. This is a set of tools I use all of the time. I’ll show you what those look like at the end of this post. Many contemporary flintknappers use modern composite tools made out of copper, plastic, lead, and other manufactured materials. Specifically, I will show how to create a set of traditional tools that is very much like what people used in the distant past. ![]() ![]() (October 27, 2016)-In this post, I’ll explain how to make a set of tools for flintknapping. ![]()
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