Friday, November 21, 2014

A Recent "Click"

The way I learn has clicks involved.  It's weird and it's always been this way.  What I mean by click is a moment in time when I spontaneously understand something and become proficient and comfortable doing it.  This recent click was with flint knapping.

This is stone age stuff.  Making weapons with sticks and stones and bones.  Clicks usually are caused by something minor but important happening.  In this case it was the way I was flaking.  Basically I wasn't putting in the time to build a platform by abrading before I tried to take a flake off.  Once I did this I greatly improved.  At that moment I realized the results were immensely improved.  So here are a few points and a few blurbs about them.

This is a novaculite point.  The red and gray isn't all that typical and I attribute that to why I went so slow and careful with this one.  This was also one of the first times I had notched a point like this.


I took this little piece of obsidian and worked with it some and this made a right sharp little point.  It's a little stout but the rock it came from wouldn't allow for a longer point.


This is a spear or atlatl point that I made.  It is by far the biggest point I've ever made and the only reason I attempted it was because I figured if I broke it there would be enough material to make an arrowhead left.


This is a small obsidian point.  I broke ears off a couple times accidentally but that's fine. It just has a nice long base for mounting to an arrow.  I gave this one to my cousin cause she thought it was pretty.


I visited an old nemesis with this point.  Glass bottle bottoms make beautiful points but before I had such a hard time dealing with the curve of the glass.  On this one it was like I had been doing this for years.  It just came naturally to me and I made this point to go on an arrow for a friend.


I was so happy with the previous bottle bottom that I grabbed a larger bottle and made another point to make sure it wasn't a fluke.  I guess it wasn't.  I made this one this morning and I tried to go a little quicker and it still took over an hour but I ended up with this point which I am pleased with.  I'll give this away as I don't plan to mount it to a hunting arrow.




No comments:

Post a Comment