OK. Sorry this is not the best of images, but I just did it with ambient indoor light. I would have rather waited for a cloudy out door situation with less glare, but said I'd put this up this evening.

The coin is a quarter for scale, and the longest lance shaped point (center second from bottom) is 7 inches. The wife and I used to do a bit of looking, and with frustrations over finding mostly broken or poor quality implements, I picked up some rock and gave it a try. The first effort took about 4 hrs and looked like it was done by a blind, spastic, 5-year old. Didn't seem to bad at the time though for a blind spastic 50-yr old.

A month of so later I found an excellent instructional manual on flint knapping written by a gentleman named Waldorf. After reading his book and breaking a few rocks, the techniques suddenly came through.

Since then, I've actually done demonstrations on reservations and at local promotion events. Again, I have never marketed any, but I have done donations for charity auctions.

As one can see, we have a variety of colors of obsidian around here. Black, red, green, a sort of battleship gray, and some that are multicolored and striated. I would need to backlight those for the effect to come through.

It's a wonderful and inexpensive hobby that takes absolute concentration. All that troubles one will leave the mind as soon as he/she starts working the angles on their material. Very little strength is required after one masters the techniques. Tools include river cobble, both the blunt and pointed ends of deer antler, and a larger sliver of uncooked turkey leg bone for much of the final small scale chipping.

As to sharpness.. The sharpest edges actually need to be dulled a bit to avoid chipping. One can actually flake edges that do end at the molecular level. Even small cuts from those edges will bleed for half an hour, because the slice is so smooth that clotting blood can not adhere. Essentially only single cells are severed rather than the ragged chain saw like damage typical of most steels. The upside is that even a severe cut can heal in about 36 hrs, because little in the way of new tissue growth is needed.

Have a good one...
[Linked Image]

Last edited by 1minute; 03/10/11.
1Minute