• This community needs YOUR help today. We rely 100% on Supporting Memberships to fund our efforts. With the ever increasing fees of everything, we need help. We need more Supporting Members, today. Please invest back into this community. I will ship a few decals too in addition to all the account perks you get.



    Sign up here: https://www.muzzleloadingforum.com/account/upgrades

Some Stone Knives

Muzzleloading Forum

Help Support Muzzleloading Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Joined
Nov 24, 2018
Messages
107
Reaction score
101
Location
Virginia
Here are the ones I knocked together for Christmas gifts for my friends. Various blades, handles of deer and bear bone and cedar. Sinew bindings, hide glue adhesive, walnut oil over. Rawhide sheaths are being made this week. The bear fibia and deer ulna are interesting bones that punch holes. Nothing like a late Christmas, huh?

standard.jpg


Pete Davis in Virginia
 
Pete, nice stuff. Are you having to heat treat your knapping materials? I just got a box of cherts from California, but have only knapped with obsidian and dacite and will certainly have to heat treat, which I have not done before.
I appreciate what you have accomplished with the pecking. It takes time and infinite patience.
 
The midwestern cherts such as the burlington and flint ridge like to be heated. Most cherts have a range of heat they like and there are charts and rates for all of them. In recent years I have transitioned to local meta-quartzites(Blue Ridge of Virginia) and these are a different enterprise altogether. Knapping with wood percussors on the brittle stone. Two of the knives in the pics are Virginia quartzite. Learning to knap the local stone and peck the hardstone tools has been a challenge and we relate a lot of what we to directly to the local artifact record. I'll try to find a pic of the quartzite stuff. I love the western volcanic materials-I had a friend at Glass Buttes that would load me down with dacite. Nice material!

standard.jpg


Cheers-PD
 
Wow, stone so brittle you need wooden flaking tools. It all wants and needs to be worked its own way. I made a few trips to Glass Buttes when I lived in Oregon, including one spring break for the Knap-in. It was something to watch guys spall dinner-plate sized flakes from obsidian boulders. It occurs in "veins" that are mined in pit excavations, and as smaller material just littering the surface. Here's a photo from my last visit to the buttes. The second favorite source in that country is the mahogany obsidian from Davis Creek, California, just over the Oregon border.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top