How to make an arrowhead . An intensive breakdown for beginner Flint Knappers

hey guys Ryan Gill here with hunt primitive where we entertain and educate and inspire and on this channel we usually do primitive build and/or hunt videos and you've heard that a whole bunch of times well there's no hunt in this video right off the bat but it is going to be a primitive build and we're going to show you how to make an arrowhead in this video is for beginners if you're looking for a easy answer on how to turn a piece of Flint into an arrowhead this is not your video okay so if you're gonna get mad that you have to sit through an hour an hour and a half of me giving you free advice on how to build an arrowhead just go ahead and hit this like and put that big ol mean sad mad emoji on there and tell me that that my channel sucks go ahead and do that now this is for people that want to learn how to make an arrowhead and typically everything that I have done prior to this has been very advanced skills with Aboriginal style flint knapping and I have had a ton of people reach out to me and just say would you please do a video for the beginners and I am happy to oblige and doing that so here in just a few minutes we're gonna run through some of the tools that I'm using from the rock that I'm using and we're just gonna move right into it before I go ahead and start smacking on this piece of rock I do want to mention that remember all of this is free information that I'm giving to people because I want you to explore your primitive passions further I want to inspire people to say I'm gonna pick up this napping set that I've never used before in this rock and I'm gonna start smacking on it and try to make my own arrowheads that is my goal I'm very passionate about it and that's why I'm doing this but all of this stuff is self sponsored by my own business which is hunt primitive dot-com so you can check a link down in the description for that but hopefully you already know who I am you can buy this rock that I'm using on my website you can also buy the tools that I'm using but quite honestly I don't care if you buy the tools from me or from somebody else because I don't make I'm a custom archery shop I make you know really I make my money to support my family with selling bows arrows atlatl stone hunting points that kind of thing I don't really make you know the money on selling supplies I basically sell supplies to kind of help you guys so if you want to purchase for me that's great thank you for your support if you want to buy it from somebody else that's perfectly fine but I will put links to the rock and tools that are in the description if you find something somewhere else you want to buy please buy it the important thing is that you are breaking rock and trying to learn how to do this stuff because this is a dying art and I hope to inspire people so anyway sorry for rambling on let's move on to the tools and the rock and let's get this point made alright so here's the basics of the tools and it's really important that I walk you through what this is kind of about now I keep dropping everything cuz I'm not used to holding all the tools and everything at once but anyway so this is Edward's shirt and it's probably the best in the country I do a lot of work with this stuff so I'm gonna put it down for a second until I can explain some of the tools to you so everything that you need to make an arrowhead is essentially right here so now there's more that you can add to this but this is all that you really need quite honestly so get your leather pad which comes with the kit I like to have a little extra piece which I don't usually include the extra piece but you can actually cut a little piece off and make it and the only reason I use the extra piece is because it's easier for me to just dump the little flakes as they go like this as opposed to moving the whole pad and so mostly that's what would we call that ergonomics as opposed that it's easier to move the little one then move the whole pad but anyway that being said you're going to be looking at kind of a big copper Bopper and these are copper pipe fittings filled with lead and I would handle a catch to them and so we've got kind of a medium/large when I do sell even larger than this and sometimes they're handy but it's not perfectly necessary and that's why I don't I actually do very little with these well I would say very little but in the piece that we're working I use more than this size and but I include both sizes because especially if you got a piece that's a little bit bigger this one comes in really handy and and kind of the reason for that is if you always just use one you're gonna put a lot of wear on it it's really handy to have too and if you're gonna have to you may as well have two different sizes and then we have a pressure flaker and these it's a twist copper rod and it runs inside now of course I'm hoping that if you're watching this you realize I do a lot of work with antler Aboriginal style tools but that stuff is really kind of difficult for people to learn on that's how I learned it took me years and years and years to do it and for many years probably a decade I never even touched a copper tool I was just on this mission of if I'm gonna have learned a foot nap I'm gonna learn to do it with Aboriginal style tools and you know deer antler bow and hammer stones that kind of thing and when I got to copper I finally had to put down my pride and say I want to learn I want to start using copper because a time is money and in reality is when I have hundreds literally hundreds of stone point orders a year and stone knives I have to be a little bit faster and more efficient in the process but I still don't want to use say cutting ground slaps I still like to use raw abstract pieces of rock like like this now there's a lot of people that use cut and grind slabs and there's nothing wrong with that if you're into the art of flint knapping but if you want to just be able to go into the wild find rock or unify rock like this and use it you know you're gonna have a lot of abstract pieces so anyway that's why we're using copper today because copper is easier to work than the antler tools and if you want antler tutorials we have stuff on that and I will inevitably be doing more in the future but anyway so we got the two billets and that comes in my standard kit with a leather pad and also and a brighter and the abrade ER we'll explain more on this later and it's essentially when you have a fine edge you use the abrade or before you hit because it's knocking off all these little pieces now when nobody explained this to me when I first got started they just said oh here's an ax breeder and you use it like this and I'm like that's unnecessary and I'm working and it only made sense to me after I used it for a long amount of time that if I made a hit on the piece of rock without abrading it that a lot of times my hit didn't go anywhere that I just crushed the edge where the abrade are if you use it will stiffen the edge and you can drive a longer flake that is what this is for is you're getting rid of all the little sharp trashy edges and it doesn't sound like it's important but after you have done this for a certain amount of time you realize how important in a breeder is and historically essentially we'd just use a little piece of hand stone or metamorphic stone and I've got several sitting over there you've probably seen me use stones before as the brazzers I sometimes use my hammer stone actually as a no-brainer but when you get a kit I send you a coarse aggregate like this it makes a beautiful AB Rader so anyway then the pressure flaker again twisted copper rods set into a hard wood handle the reason I don't use like on these these are big essentially big giant dowel rods that I'll put down in because they're not any stress stress points it's it wraps around the whole thing but when I do the Flay curse I actually do them on a natural stick that's why they look like this or not a dowel rod because you have stuff like grain run out and what happens if you have a lie on the grain perfectly and you go to remove a flake you can actually split the piece of wood if it's a dowel rod but if you're using a natural stick it's got grain that runs in a circular pattern because it's essentially a little tree or a stick so it's got growth rings just like a tree so it doesn't have grain runs out long ways like this or like this so that's why when you get a pressure flicker I use sticks instead hopefully that kind of makes sense to you now if you get a little bit you can use this for just about everything you can even notch for it or not with it now I drop the other one if you get the extra advanced kit or buy one of these separate this is what I call a notching flaker and it's essentially I'll put it up here so hopefully you can see if the camera will focus on there we go it's another flaker and you can just buy a regular flaker at the same cost doesn't matter and you hammer the end flat so essentially you're taking a normal flaker and you're turning it into a flathead screwdriver now of course you can't really use it as a screwdriver because it's copper and it'll just twist the screwdriver as opposed to the screw but that's what we're using this for is notching and you don't have to have this but this it does help so again when you buy the basic kit it doesn't have the the notching tool because you don't have to have it but if you want to advance into this a little bit more it's a good tool to have and then also in the advanced kit is this little gem right here if I can get the camera to focus on that and this is what I call a little rascal now it's not pronounced rascal it's called little rascal and that's what I call that but it's a fun little piece so it's another little billet and you don't have to have this so this is the smaller of the other billets you don't have to have it but I've started using these little half-inch billets and it's just super super handy so if you're wanting to have a bunch of tools and kind of exploit all their different new uses it's good to have the notching tool and a little rascal as I like to call it it does help but you don't have to have these you can build everything without these but they do kind of help so I'm going to leave it up to you what what you want to have now some people when they make I'll show you this question some people when they make flint knapping tools they'll automatically start rounding them so you'll buy them and they're rounded and I don't do that I use the square edges and the reason for that is I actually prefer the square edge I can get a much more precise hit that's why when I sell them they're they're very square edged and I've heard a lot of people ask questions about that now over time obviously this one was brand new at some point they round themselves over because you're hitting this repeatedly in over by the time it rounds itself out now that doesn't mean that this is useless I mean we still use this all the time but that's where when you do as much snapping as I do if you have hundreds that you're going through or even dozens and dozens eventually you're gonna start rounding these out it's gonna take you a long time to get to this but essentially you kind of evolve with the tool a little bit so it doesn't hurt if it's around and it doesn't hurt if it's square there's many times that I prefer a square edge like I said because I can get a very precise hit because the point of impact is going to be right on this slow square edge as opposed to this that's a little bit more round and sometimes but it's in it's inevitable that you're gonna take a square piece in over amount of time you're gonna round it then there's nothing wrong with that but sometimes that's when the little rascal comes in handy because as you can see even though it's got a lot of wear on it's still much more square so we can use this for some of our bigger reduction and then as we get down to when we need those little fine edges this is where this kind of comes in handy so hopefully that didn't overwhelm you too much now you can I've explained all the tools I want to work on going through the progression of some of these tools and I'm not gonna use the new ones so that I just showed you just simply because I want to show you that as you wear these things down and this is my normal set so I'm just gonna you know use these as I normally would I always pretty much start off with the abrade err and knock things down a little bit and again it's to get rid of all the trashy stuff that's on the edge if you hit it like up here let's use this as an example I didn't abri this and if you hit this I want you to see that right there and we're gonna let the camera focus in on you see how it's a whole bunch a little crap that's what happens when you don't abrade so you can't really run a flake very far if you don't abrade it just knocks off a little junk along the way now if we abrade that and knock off some of the little tiny micro flakes and really stiffen that edge then we can take the bigger Bopper and now all of a sudden we can run these beautifully long flakes so a braiding as much as it's not really fun and you don't have to sit here in a braid for three hours before you take a hit it's literally like just not just stuff off till nothing's coming off and then you can take a pretty good hit and knock a nice flake so I typically do like to a braid in between almost every hit not entirely you can see I'm knocking little stuff off so that's what I was kind of doing trying to get a long flake I mean it wasn't running it was just breaking so I'm going to stop and rebreathe and there we go we got some nice big flakes so that's part of the secret to actually thinning a piece that's where a lot of people struggle in thinning now if you know anything about flint knapping whatsoever and this is really hard to explain without drawing a big giant diagram but it's what we call can coil fracture and everything everything fractures in a cone shape now this took me a long time to really wrap my head around because you think well if I hit it like this where's the cone this is from the very tip of where you hit is the little peak of the code and the energy travels out in a cone shape but this is only one micro side essentially of the cone so if I hit it right here and this is the tip I'm going to use a flaker to kind of point this so if I hit it right here and this is the cone the tip of the cone the cone goes outwards like this so obviously a cone gets smaller and smaller as you get to the top so hopefully that little I got to put it where you can see it I guess huh so the cone if the tip is right here it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger as it goes so you got imagine this big cone like this and it comes right up to this little tiny spot right here and what we're doing is we're essentially removing we're not removing whole cone because all this energy is being dispersed but when we hit it here it's removing a little side of that cone if that makes any sense at all and I know it took me a long time to get it but you can kind of see it with this you can see it when we hit it here that it removes a flake here and it's okay to kind of visualize it as these [ __ ] flat sheets of paper that come off because it kind of is but if you say you hit this piece right in the middle which is just going to shatter the piece but what it's going to do is that the Spirit disperses energy from the very tip in a cone fashion so if you had a great big piece of rock if you hit it here the the cone would get wider and wider the further it goes out because you're displacing energy from here to here hopefully that makes a little bit of sense like I said it took me a while to understand it after a while when you remove flakes and you see that they break and they're all rounded it'll start making so much more sense and this is why I don't like to teach the basics of flint knapping because so many things are very difficult to explain now that we know that I've seen a lot of people they'll take a piece of rock like this and they'll say okay I want to remove a flake over here and they're holding it like this and they're trying to hit it and knock it off and that doesn't work because the cone if you hit it here trying to shear a piece off the cone is actually running all the way onto the bows so if you do manage to actually break it all you're gonna do is essentially just blow up the whole piece of rock you can brake anywhere so what we're doing is we're turning that we're turning the piece on its side and we're gonna braid it off and when we hit it in a downward angle just on the very edge right here like this we're using the cone not facing straight down but the cone is going off to the side and we're removing just the one side of the cone like that and any of these pieces that you pick up and look at let the camera focus here a second if it'll do it will have curvature do you see how that has a curve to it a natural curve that's because cones are not straight lines they wrap and they're constantly curving all the way around so the energy that we're getting off of these is curving around the rock on every single hit so hopefully that makes a little bit of sense like I said you're gonna have to put tools to rock in practice to learn what you're doing now all that being said another little crash course on this is I want you to now that you understand the cone thing maybe a teeny tiny bit I want you to envision this is tough I want you to envision this rock as a whole flat of paper you know how if you go by a whole flat of like printer paper it's just all this paper stacked and as you remove paper obviously the stack gets smaller right it's perfect makes perfect sense so when we look at this as being in a stack of paper what we're trying to do is removing sheets of paper at a time so all these high spots like over here you can tell is much higher than in the middle so in order to thin this piece we have to remove essentially sheets of paper which is again little cones coming off the side but we're going to call it sheets of paper for this instructional purpose but as we've removed these that's what's gonna make it thinner now if you run right in here to the middle and decide that's it I'm gonna hit here and try to remove Moe at once it's not gonna work it see they're gonna break the piece or it's gonna come in here it's gonna make what we call a step fracture or a hinge and you're not gonna actually be able to remove these outside pieces efficiently because essentially that's the product of just being in patient so what we need to do is keep in mind the places that are high like on this we need to remove these outside edges before we ever decide that we're gonna move remove these places they're dipped in so you can obviously tell if this is a flat of paper we're gonna get to this sheet long before we get to this sheet you can see the distance here so if you're like cool I'm gonna remove stuff here it's gonna fight you the whole way because you need to remove this to release this if that makes any sense whatsoever this is always very difficult to explain so and that being said what we need to do is build a platform that is on the side of the rock that we want to remove the material okay so hang with me here if you again look at it like sheets of paper and take right in the center of the sheet of paper and draw an imaginary line right down the center of this now obviously this is on the outside edge and this is the farthest edge that we have and luckily we have a tiny little platform right here in a platform is something that kind of jets out further than everything else and as long as it's on this side we can remove a flake from this side of the rock if the platform is on this side from Center we can remove it from this side but if you have a platform on this side and you try to hit it to go this way you're not going to be able to get that flake to remove because simply you can't run a long flick what'll happen is instead of hitting it here in removing a long flake you'll hit it here trying to go this way and it can't run all the way across the whole piece so you're only gonna get a flake that runs along the top and that you know I'm not saying you'll never see me hit one this way and if I do it's because I'm trying to actually develop a platform to hit it this way so here's what I want to do I know this is again very difficult to understand you can see how the platform is favoring or it's raised on this side because our platform is here so we have all our sheets of paper and blah blah blah and here's the center line right at the tip of my flaker so this one we want to remove the flake off this side so we need to turn it down show you that again that's the one we want to remove so we turn it down and we're gonna hit right there but we're gonna do it with our billet so go ahead and abrade it off to stiffen the platform and we see how we just removed that flake in fact what I should do is get it back I don't know if it's the same flake or not hopefully it is it is so I just showed this to you that this was the platform and there you go you see how we just essentially removed sheets of paper in that flat and that's the basics of flint knapping and thinning now if you want to follow this down the rest of the way obviously it's higher on this side so we need to remove this material now one little nugget of information I'll turn this around several ways so you can see it but there's a cup in here it's a very cupped opposite of what my hand is right now but it's cupped in here now if you try to run into this what its gonna do is it's kinda like if you try to braid this off and take a big hit to drive a flake it's going to come in to about here here and it's going to step fracture and prohibit this flake from traveling further so anything that's cupped like this you have to remove the outer edge of that Cup so again if the cups here we're going to face it down and then we're going to take and instead of two a big hit we're actually going to what we call batter witches we're just crushing the edge we're not hitting it hard we're just breaking the edge and making a whole bunch of this little trash and we are eliminating that Cup essentially and so while it still is cupped here our platform is actually moved from this side where it's cupped over to this side do you see that right here so before it was over here and it was cupped and we battered that edge off so every time that you remove material off this side it's raising the platform on this side so that's just some of the big secrets to flint knapping this is the basics of it is very very very important to say when you want to build a platform say to remove a flake and this is a great example right here is there is a flake that's right here it's very kind of hard to see probably from where you're at but there's right here there's a flake that needs to be removed but the platform is actually right on center you can see it kind of jogs to the side over here and then it comes back but it's not quite to this side it kind of runs right down the center so what we need to do is we take our billet and we're going to take the opposite direction so actually the side that we want to remove material on believe this or not this is Department hangs a lot of people up say sure we want to put this down we want to hit but the problem is we can't right now because the platforms on the other side so what we're going to do is turn it over the other way and we're gonna batter the edge and what we're doing is we're building a platform which we just did so hopefully if you need to rewind it and go look at what we are talking about it was over here the platform either ran down the center or favored this side and by battering pieces off we raised the platform to favor this side so now we can put that down what we'll do is we find the braider I dropped brave it off because now we're trying to actually drive a flake so this is a site we want to remove so we're gonna we're gonna face the piece down always removing flakes off the bottom and we're gonna hit it on that side now the the angle in which you hit takes time to learn it takes a long time to really learn what angle to hit a piece of rock if you hit it straight on obviously you're not removing the code you're dispersing the cone throughout if it's too flat all you're gonna do is get these little tiny pieces so you have to rock this piece back and meet it somewhere in the middle and this simply just takes practice there's pretty much no alternative to putting your hands on tools and hands on a rock and quite frankly you know if you're gonna take up flint knapping you have to be willing to say hey i'm not gonna buy a kit and buy a little box of rock and for $100 at the end of it I'm gonna be able to make arrowheads and that's that's a hard pill for some people to swallow the reality is you're probably gonna buy a $100 $200 box of rock and just blow every single piece up you're going but you're gonna learn something along the way you're probably in all honesty gonna be two three four five hundred dollars invested into Rock before you actually produce stuff that you're gonna be like now that really looks like an arrowhead but that's just normal I mean that's just we all have gone through it but you don't think that when you start you're thinking well I'm gonna buy like two pounds of rock and by the end of it I'll haven't figured out it'll make an arrowhead some people are fast learners and they sort it out but your average person is gonna end up blowing up a lot Rock and you need to accept that because you're learning a trade you're learning a skill this is not something that just comes super easy if it was super easy everybody would do it but it is very very challenging so anyway we've removed a lot off this side and it actually has because originally when we were looking at we were looking at from this side and we were removing a bunch of stuff over here and we did that and by removing this off this side we raised the platform and now we're actually ready to remove stuff on this side of the rock so again you can see that the center line kind of runs right down and then it jogs off to this side just a little bit and then it comes back and it makes this perfect little platform wreck it so we'll abrade that off and then there we go got a nice little flake ran right across there will it break it off kind of keep battering that out and although it's not very good you can see that we're kind of maintaining a nice center line now and we'll be able to come back to this now the best thing we can do is flip this rock over and say look at this mess that we have here and as much as we want to remove this what we would call a turtle back which it's flat on this side but it is kind of rounded on this side and we need to remove this so as money as much as we like to say well we're just going to start hitting on this and trying to drive flakes across our platform favors the flat side and that's very normal in flint knapping so what happens is people think well you can see it's got this turtle back you can see how flat it is here and how hard it is here and if you want to remove this people are like okay well I'm gonna do the same thing I did before and I'm gonna set it here and I'm going to start hitting it but the problem is is this center line is on this side and it's heavily on this side so if you're thinking about the flat plate paper again let's do that and run a center line right down through the center you're gonna be looking at like right here is the center line so our platform is heavily on this side so to think that you're going to be able to remove this big rounded turtle back section from hitting it here it's not going to go and so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hit it on that side so you you can see that it's not going to go because sometimes it's important to show people that it's not going to work what it does is it drives in and makes it worse so you have to accept that your arrow head of your atlatl point is not gonna be this big okay you that's not how this works you have to remove material from the sides to get it thin so what we're going to do is remove more material on this side so we can take material off to get rid of this Turtleback so what we're gonna do is flip it around here's the flat side we're gonna put the flat side down okay and now we are going to batter not trying to remove big flakes but what we're trying to do is remove a whole bunch of little trash right off this side because remember when we remove flakes off the bottom or remove flakes off any side it raises the platform so we haven't raised it enough yet but you can see that now the center line is getting a little bit more towards the center where as opposed to before it was way over here we were moving material off and that moves the center line up so I'm going to remove a little bit more here and a little bit more here and actually we're getting to a point where we can actually try to drive a couple of longer flakes off of here so and I'm actually going to switch because this is a smaller piece I wanted to start with the bigger bills to show you but we're going to switch to the smaller when usually when you're working a bigger a bigger small overall is when you want the big one so we're gonna switch to this smaller billet and I'm gonna go ahead and knock a couple of those and if they start turning choppy make sure you break it there we go alright cam we're trying to kind of timed out on us there a little bit so hopefully we didn't miss too much of this but I removed these flakes off this side with little billet and we started to flatten this edge out so hopefully you can see that and of course every time we remove material off the side again it raises the platform for the other side now we're getting relatively flat up in here now we still have a little high spot here in a little high spot here so we're gonna braid those off and take some little flakes and these are just they're not big walloping hits they're just very direct in what I'm doing is I'm hitting a very very very tiny little edge you see this alleged right here just the tip of this we have braid that off and that is what's going to remove you can see the little precipice of this of this piece of rock it's not like I just hit this big giant piece and knocked it off its it starts is just this tiny little tip and then the energy wave goes down through and shears this off so again everything that we remove from one side automatically raises the platform for the other side I cannot stress that enough so what I'm doing right now is I'm going to braid that off and I'm actually battering this edge because remember our turtle back that's over here on this side because we flipped it around we're more flat on this side here turtle back is we're trying to remove material off the side that's flat so we can get a platform to remove the big rounded turtle back and so I think we've done that I'm turning it around now because now I'm ready to hit on the other side so now you can see the turtle back on this side let's fly it on this side but you can see just right here I raised the platform which used to be on this side and I shifted the platform over to now I actually have enough I can probably hit and start removing that turtle back and it's not giving me good flakes so what I'm gonna do is on the stop I'm gonna braid it off good I'm gonna find a new little tiny platform and I'll hit it and see there's a piece that came off it wasn't a big beautiful piece but all right now what I want to do I kind of stopped midstream here because we're getting kind of close to tip not terribly important we're going to take pressure flaker and we're going to set up a platform using the pressure flaker now if this is the side that we want to take the flake off because of the Turtleback we need to remove flakes from here going this way so we'll lay this side down and what I'm doing is essentially grabbing onto the rock with the flaker and I'm pushing down and chipping rock off so getting all these little chips and it does take I know it doesn't look like much but it does take a fair amount of wrist and forearm strength to do this and it does take time I see a lot of people they push on and they're just not getting anything there's a certain technique to grabbing the edge and you kind of roll your wrist I tend to rock back if you'll see this in the future I tend to rock back on the point like this with my thumb and then I put the flaker in and then as I Rock the two together I break them away and that gives me a little bit more leverage and I don't always do that but typically if I'm trying to drive a long flake you see me rock this back and put this on edge and it typically happens really fast so fast that you probably don't even realize I've done it see if that makes sense see you see how I'm leaning that back and I'm getting a hold of it and by removing these little choppy flakes off this side it's the same as when we're battering it what were you doing it with a flake er we've raised the platform now to this side a tool down oh that I dropped it so our platform is on this side here so we're going to lay that side down and we have a nice little platform here and a nice little platform here and then we knock that flake off there's one right next to it so we'll get that one and now here's a nice big platform whether this kind of this Turtleback is right here you can see so we're gonna hit on this platform and try to knock that off hmm very nice a little one there a little in there a little in there braid it off so we're right back to kind of now we're actually thinning this piece out it actually is starting to look pretty good right so but we haven't done anything with the back or this back Turtleback but the tip in general is actually starting to get fairly even it's actually starting to resemble the tip of another head right so that's the problem with sitting here working in this you drop all your tools what I'm probably gonna do now is I'm gonna take the pressure flaky I don't have to do it you don't have to do it right now but sometimes I like to be really uniformed and what I'm working and I got a little bit more let's camera you can see that this center line that runs favors this side more than this side right so the center line really should be at the very very tip of my flaker should be just off to the side a little tiny bit and it's not it's off to this side so I'm going to do is I'm actually just going to pressure flick this off again we take the side that the platform is on we lay it down and we're going to push those flakes off I'm leaning it back up getting hold of it and I rock it together and you don't normally expect to get super big long flakes from pressure flaking what pressure flaking is doing is taking little flakes anywhere from a quarter of an inch to maybe on the long side you my mean you can get some long ones if you have a really nice platform for the most part you're looking at you know 3/8 to 1/2 an inch long little flakes now we're gonna come back to this little turtle back on the back side see so let's flip it over this is our point that we just worked flip it over and you see how this size really raised up this sides relatively flat again we're still kind of rounded on this side so if we're looking at our sheets of paper we have to remove these outside edges before we remove anything down little from the inside so I'm gonna braid that off now this was a very good point to show you right here this is almost it's not quite a 90 degree angle but it's almost a 90 degree angle you can see how this comes straight up and almost over I mean it's probably like it's probably like a 94 degree angle or something it's off-center or whatever it is and if you try to hit directly on this 90 degree angle it's either if you hit it steep enough it's just going to remove these little tiny flakes or if you hit it hard enough it's going to go in and then step fracture so unfortunately if you turn this over and say look oh you know what I hear that let's do this I'm gonna intentionally mess it up and hopefully not break it completely let me see how I get these little choppy ones it actually there's no word to even hit it's just it's not going to go so when you set this thing down to hit there's there's nothing here you're gonna hit the top edge of this before you ever hit the bottom edge so if that's the case what you have to do is start going to the edges and saying well here's a platform and here's a platform instead of working a trade on this platform you have to zigzag or walk your right way around from the corner around the back of the piece now here's a nice little platform so we're gonna turn it over and see how we get this nice long little flake beautiful Sam there's another one right there now braid it off again always remember after one or two hits to stop and a braid you know not notice I've never I've never caught way back and smacked crap out of this thing that's what you maybe do with some big giant pieces for the most part this is like little little risk types if you hit it that hard and it doesn't release it's because you either didn't hit it where you were supposed to or the angle was wrong so if you just sit here and just in hitting it and something that was released but if you're just sitting there just beating on it and it's not going anywhere it's because you either your angle is wrong or you don't have a defined platform but if you're hitting it like here and it's not going and you just wail on it you're just gonna break the piece so you have to have to show some patience so now what I'm going to do is I think I've explained the basics of this to you fairly well I'm gonna just trow up the sides and that's the thing too is if you take a hit and it doesn't release the flake after a while you start rocking you can do these little choppy flakes and or not removing anything and you start rocking the by face that's what this is called the point into it and eventually even hitting it small you'll turn it enough that it hits and actually removes a little flake so as I'm hitting these and I'm barely grazing the edge it's not releasing but I'll turn this in ever so slightly right up until it does so I'm gonna stop right here and I might be pretty steep and I'll hit it it's not going I'll keep rocking the piece of rock into it until I get the flake that removes just like that there we go so sometimes you'll see where I don't just take one hit I'll take a little series and I'll just kind of rock it in a little bit closer every single time okay now on this backside we're still at this 90 degree angle it looks you know it's very very it's a tough spot so what we're gonna do is remove this side and then this side then this side and this side so I'm gonna do is I'm gonna turn down and you can see right here I've moved the platform now to this side of the rock and then we'll get a flat you know are still are 90 degrees here but if you follow it around the edge now the platform's on this side I'll put that edge down remove a flake or two look that one more I could probably do and what we did by doing that by we're by removing that as we move the platform from what was on this side of the rock now to that side of the rock because remember when you remove a flake off one side it raises the platform on the other and now we flip it over and we hit it that way it looks like we got probably one more that's a pretty good one but again as we remove flakes off the bottom it raises the platform so what we're gonna do is braid it off and then flip it over oh and then hit it on that side now unfortunately this happens all too often you get really invested and you break it in half now you've seen me do that and that doesn't hurt my feelings because quite honestly it just happens it happens all the time but what we're gonna do is I'm going to catch up another by face probably to this point but that's important to see especially when you hit on the back of a piece like the sides you always run the risk of breaking it when you hit from the sides but when you're working the back of a piece you stand a much higher chance of breaking a piece in half and I I want you to I'm actually kind of glad it happened in a certain way as much as I was making progress because everybody breaks rock everybody it just it's part of flint knapping not to say is you ain't if you ain't you ain't makin if you ain't breaking here's what they say so I can actually still get a little Arrowhead out of this one but I'm gonna save that for another time and this is probably a wonderful time to take a little break I'm may move on to the second part of the video but I may not I may just catch up another one - where are we getting right down to this triangle shape because we are almost to the point of pressure flaking it into a point so we were getting to the shape and we worked mostly through all the by facing with percussion and as soon as we were just about ready to get rid of that last little 90-degree spot we were gonna finish this point so anyway I'm gonna work on a new one don't ever be discouraged if you base break a piece of rock at the end of the day it's a piece of rock is it expensive Rock kind of it's not a precious gemstone but at the end of the day it's a piece of rock throw it down grab a new piece because you learn something every single time you break one so let me get another one caught up to this point and it kind of makes me happy to see that even Ryan Gill is fallible he breaks rock and then we're gonna keep going from here hang with us alright well since I broke the other one and I have to make a new and this has given me an opportunity almost to show you how fast inexperienced Napper when I say it I could work through a piece of rock because after you put in a very very long time of flint knapping you'll be able to move remove material extremely fast so what what probably already took me you know forty minutes in detailed instruction to remove I am able to remove this here in just a couple minutes like mostly that my percussion napping doesn't take that long once you're experienced percussion napping is actually relatively fast usually you know between five and ten minutes and so here in real time which is really just gonna be a couple minutes I'm going to work this out you have to keep in mind I have been flint knapping for well over a decade and I also have more practice than your say your average guy that's been napping a decade because I do this for I make stone points by the hundreds every single year for people hunt with that's not including the stone knives and stuff like that make just hunting points in general so I have a ridiculous amount of experience so I don't want you to look at this and say wow in one month I'm gonna be able to pick up a piece of rock it just beat it into shape the way MIT Ryan Gill does but I want to give some perspective into that this is this would be comparative to say like I don't play piano I can play a couple little things on the piano and I musically inclined but isn't just learning to play piano it's like you start working on just like little chord progressions and and it's a very very slow process you don't just jump into it and play you know a Beethoven piece or a big intricate classical piece the second you start playing piano it takes years and years and years before you can just use your you're naturally trained with muscle memory to be able to create that music and that's really the same thing with flint knapping where you're not just gonna pick up a rock and pick up a tool and start beating on it and turn it into something it's I have a ton of mouth muscle memory and I can look at an angle and pretty much know in probably a fraction of a second if I am capable of removing a flake from it but in real time this gives me the opportunity to show you how fast we should be able to actually buy faced with production so what took me you know it 40 minutes or an hour a half hour I don't even know how long it took me to show you how to reduce that piece I'm gonna do it here within just a couple minutes and we're gonna remove some big old flakes to deal with it too you almost there we're almost caught right back up to where we were before so you're looking at like literally five minutes from spall to a my piece that's ready to pressure flake or ready to micro percussion nap so what has taken me you know probably an hour so to teach realistically I am able to produce and in life I'll usually say five to ten minutes and I'm not afraid to break a piece like I said before it's just rough and I know you all sat through that for a long time and thought ways you worked on that for an hour and then it broke that's devastating but the reality is you just see me working this again I'm you know five and a half minutes of deep into this so for me to sit on a normal working day to work a piece like this and then spend five minutes and it breaks it's like no big deal let's go grab another piece of rock and I continue on so anyway we're pretty much exactly back where we were when I snapped the other one in half and we're at almost nine minutes so again it's not the end of the world safe so I'm gonna continue to spin this down a little bit more when I get it just to the point that I'm ready to pressure flake I'm gonna let you know but anyway actually what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna switch to our little friend here called the little rascal remember it's called a little rascal not rascal coz rascal sounds funnier and it's just a little bit just doing the same thing that the other one was but I'm removing these little micro flakes now I am a lap Napper some people don't nap on their lap I do but I don't primary I don't I don't completely nap on my lap it depends on the rock I'm using some rocks are more difficult sometimes I will find a piece that's just not being removed on laughs I talked about this in some of my advanced videos but I just want to let you know a little bit about it well take especially this little guy here or a little antler billet and I do it freehand and I knock it just like that and remove a flake okay let's see if you can see that again okay and I catch it with my finger and nap it off now it's a little experience napping technique but I wanted to explain why it's all taking place on my lap right now and not freehand like you'll see other people doing it I I am come almost completely self-taught of course I picked up some tips and tricks along the way from other people and but primarily at the end of the day I learned to do this really organically it was when I started napping it was before there was before YouTube even existed and you essentially if you wanted to learn you learned from you went and saw somebody do it one time or you went to the same show where there was one guy nap and that's how it was for me when I first got started I'd show up to an archery tournament and it was like one guy you would sit there and make arrowheads and it wasn't very talkative but I would watch him do it I got a very strong interest in it and he handed me a piece of rock and said this is how you do it and said get you a piece of deer antler and do it like this and I said okay and I went home and I could not do it and I'm frustrated for years I was still very young teenager and it wasn't till years later that I got the strength and had kind of the mental capacity to say I'm trying to remove rock and I still sucked when I started and I had kind of a couple years head start at least in knowing how the process worked but no anyway see here when I get back to some instruction here and once I could [ __ ] them I start the video over because we're about to timeout hold on all right so we're looking at our center line and if we're again looking at sheets of paper right and platforms if you having to rock this back and forth because I want you to see it there's a platform right here and I mean it is a phenomenal platform right there you can see the out of the center line because Center right here is like gorgeous right I mean it's like almost a straight line then it comes over and goes all the way over and then it comes back so that is York like ideal awesome platform now if you [ __ ] back and just smack the crap out of this to remove this little high spot you're just going to break the crap out of this point right now you can take now if switch side so it's on this side because I'm going to face it down you can take it and press your flake some of this off but this is a pretty decent little platform and this is again what I'm going back to on the micro what I call micro percussion and if you just hold this thing and hit it there's a very good chance like I did on the last one because I'm an idiot and talking while I'm doing it instead of paying attention what I'm doing you snap this thing right here and I don't want to do that so either a I'm gonna end up holding it with a little bit of tension not mom not clamping down I'm giving a little bit of tension on the back where it can rock almost freely and I'm gonna hit it very gently like that okay see how lately I hit that and I remove that flake and then I'm going to braid it off and I'm gonna do the same thing I'm gonna help hold it not up here back here and rock this back and then one little tiny tap so this is it it's hard not to want to just grab a piece and beat the crap out of it that's how you break things in half that's how I broke the last one in half because I'm running my mouth trying to explain this stuff instead of concentrating on what I'm doing the reality is if you really concentrate you can knock these tiny little flakes off very very safely so I'm gonna come back there's another platform here I'm gonna do the same thing okay now this see how I'm hitting this and it doesn't want to go most people's tendency is oh it didn't go on somebody's feet I'm gonna hit harder and harder and then I blew the whole thing up that's just I see that people get really impatient so this is really important so we're hitting here it doesn't want to let go we got to take our pressure flaker flip the piece so here's the spot that we want to do I'll keep my piece on flip it over okay this is the platform I was hitting on now what we want to do is we remove Lakes off this side off the bottom because we are remember every time you remove a flake you're raising a platform so what we're doing is for removing flakes in releasing that spot that's right there and then we're going to braid it off flip it back over now we have a little bit better of a platform and lookie there pop right off it was that simple so instead of just hitting it harder and harder and harder and harder take a hit and that's why this is a fun little nugget of information I don't have a lot of bases of experience on this myself but one of the things that my archaeologists good friend Morgan Smith has pointed out is a lot of times what they see and some of the not all the times but some of the times see in the archaeological record is that women are actually buried with flint knapping tools which would signify that you have a lot of women that are doing the flint knapping and it might actually be because women are less likely to take a piece and try to smash it into submission women are very much wired that's why a lot of times women are very good rifle shots because they're not trying to force stuff they're very delicate instead II and what we might call technique oriented so they're gonna look at this and instead of being male oriented like me where I want to smash the crap out of this thing because I want to remove this flake they're gonna look at it and they're gonna hit it and if it doesn't remove the flake that they want they're gonna flip it over and they're very patient little beings as women usually are and they're going to remove flakes off the one side and then they're gonna say okay well that looks much better and they'll take these little tiny hits and that's one of the really important things I want you to take from flint knapping in general is we don't want to ever force the rock to do what we wanted to do because if we force it you are 95 99 I don't know what the real percentage is I'm just saying that because that's what I want to say essentially you stand a exceptionally great chance of exploding the rock if you're just trying to force it into submission one of the best things you can do is do like I'm doing right now as you take a pressure flaker and you build a platform all the way up and down work because right now what I was doing it so I want to remove this side of the rock so I'm a bill old I'm removing flakes here to build the platform and then you very gently remove the flakes so these get these tiny little flakes that come off now as much as I like to use my big billets and smack the crap out of a piece of rock because to me percussion napping is fun that's where it's at that's why I actually went to use the the micro percussion because I prefer to actually hit a piece of rock as opposed to pressure fly kidding but at the end of the day what we're really to a point on this piece of rock that it's time to really a for the most part I'm not saying we'll never come back to this we need to drop it on the floor because now it's really just time to pressure flake using the pressure flaker and I'm not always again rocking it back super far now if I've got a big flake that I'm trying to remove like right here's a good one I'm really gonna rock this back I'm gonna analyze it I'm gonna put my flaker right on the edge and I'm gonna push in the idea is you're trying to push in and then you break it away as you go down so you're going in and down and if you're just doing these little flakes you essentially can just hold this with your thumb and kind of I kind of roll like this if that makes sense so I'll come in I'll put it on and then I roll and push down and I can break these little flakes away and I'm not grabbing a way up high I'm grabbing just right on the little edge and if it doesn't grab really good again that's where you're coming with the 'greater make sure you braid it off good because if you find a spot let's say here that's not well abraded and you do it it just it won't grab it just crumbles these little tiny edges but once you abrade it you can grab these little pieces and just pop them off now here I'm gonna try to get a better flake and so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna rock it back pretty heavy and I'm gonna line this up really where I'm gonna put that flake right where I want them already pushing and they're actually like this right now I'm gonna push them together really good pretty hard and it does take practice and you're using muscles you don't normally use so don't expect to be able to do it good right off the bat and then I'm going to roll these two together and then push off with the fleiger same just like that and see how I ran I almost ran it actually got an overshoot and I have a nice little callus right there on my thumb you see that and if I didn't have that callus I would have actually just jammed that Flint flake into my finger so again I don't cut myself very often my hands are extremely calloused I do this for a living I build hundreds of these things a year so this is not a big deal for that to hit me because what we did is we shot an overshoot off in that little flake right there would have just jammed into I've done it before I've gotten a city like I have scars here where I've jammed sharp rocks into there if you are making broad the making arrowheads you're gonna break them and you're gonna cut yourself that's inevitable once you get to a point where you are used to doing it and your hands are adjusted to it you won't cut yourself very often at all now a lot of people are sitting there saying why aren't you wearing gloves you can do that because if you're working with these big bulky gloves quite honestly you're not you're never gonna get the precision in the field that you are gonna do get barehanded if you work with gloves all the time so this is the disclaimer on this you're gonna cut yourself you're gonna you're gonna cut yourself pretty good you're gonna have to take tweezers and pull pieces of rock out of you because the flint knapping isn't for little crybabies it's it's for people that aren't afraid to get a cut I mean it's not a big deal to jam a piece of rock into you quite frankly you need to go into this knowing you're gonna end up bleeding and then once you've done it as long as I have you've got these these calluses that are massive I mean it takes a heck of a heck of a flake of rock to get into this callus it's phenomenally thick and some folks even say to why aren't you wearing safety glasses and that is a good thing I think I think a lot of folks should wear safety glasses I would never advise anybody not to wear safety glasses and oftentimes if you nap indoors you can run into problems with silicosis which is every time you hit this there's like a little fine dust particles that come off this and if you breathe that in over an amount of time like I do you can eventually have enough of the silica in your lungs that can cause some major damage to you now whenever I nap inside I'm not doing it day because I'm trying to film a video so I can survive one day but I have a fan right over here on this side of me and the fan is always running and blowing this off if I'm napping inside but a lot of times I nap outside where I have a nice little breeze so keep that in mind as well and then as far as the safety glasses go while I do recommend many people wear safety glasses that's a great thing because sometimes you'll have a chip that comes up typically my method of napping in your lap does not produce flakes that come back to me where when you're doing a lot of freehand napping or your pressure flaking like this in your lap you get flakes is shoot back to you I don't have that happen have I ever had that happen and flakes come to me on a freak thing absolutely but and I wouldn't use contacts as a fail-safe but I wear contact lenses so I would never advise you to say hey while I wear contacts oh it's not a big deal but essentially if you wear contacts and you get a little chip that flies up and lands in your eye your contact will catch it so if you're really good at not not blinking you can go in house you can watch all the stone off your hands clean up really good and then pull the contact out rinse the stone flake off and stick it back in that's essentially what I do so that's why I don't wear contacts and if I ever go here see me at a show or in Napa and I'm not wearing safety glasses it's because I'm actually quite confident that if I do get a rock chip in there it's not a big deal usually I've got contact solution pretty close oh you pop my contact out I rinse everything my fingers the contact off really good and I stick it back in my eye and keep going she do I recommend everybody else do that not really but that's that's me so if you're gonna do this I do recommend eye protection and then also make sure that you are in a very well ventilated area because nobody wants to succumb to silicosis so all that stuff covered all the disclaimer nonsense that's gonna get me sued by somebody that cut themselves or breathed and flint dust will get back onto this so essentially what I'm doing now that I've got this really down to a nice triangle now it's just pressure flaking in the basics of pressure flaking are exactly the same as percussion there what we're doing those we're just grabbing an edge and we're breaking it off off the bottom so remember I told you so instead of hitting it we're very precise but instead of trying to drive these flakes that are this long essentially now we're just driving flakes that are this long so we're doing the same exact thing it's the basics of flint knapping as building platforms and abrading the edge and removing the flake so you can see on this side we're actually pretty good we have a little tiny turtle back right here so unfortunately what we need to do is if we want to remove this turtle back we have to make our points smaller which is not a problem this one's actually quite large so we're going to remove flakes off of this side and a downward angle to build a platform to remove off the other side so remember remember the battering we did it was just little short choppy strokes like that hold up looks like what the whistle is thick and it's I'm doing a lot of talking there so all those short choppy battery flakes that we did to build a platform now what we do is we're moving just we're not rocking back to drive a flake we're just pushing straight down we're removing flakes off the bottom of the piece to raise the platform and I'm actually it's like I already know how far I have to go down but I recommend you remove a flit a few and then kind of look at it and then what I'll kind of do too is oddly enough be proactive in this just because you want to remove off this side and you have to remove little choppy flakes if you come down a little bit you're like oh well here's a little spot I could I could take a longer flake out of that abrade it off and again you're killing two birds with one stone sure we want to build a platform on this side but I got a little flake here that really needs to come off so I'm just gonna grab that and yank that off really fast I got two or three of those in here perfect and then we're right back to just raising our platform so it's just strategic flake removal okay I think I think overall we're almost to like a kind of a really tight center line but you can see on this side I'm going to point it out right here there's a silly little spot there we got to get rid of and then over here we can really we don't have to but we want to make this a really nice point so we need to get rid of some of this little turtle back that's right here you can see it's very flat on this side and very rounded on this side so what I want to do is I'm going to remove just a teeny tiny few more on this side and I'm almost gonna grind it off this is another little thing - it's like the battering but instead of using the very tip of the flaker what we're gonna use as the side and we're just gonna roll it and grind it off if it wants to come off easy we're gonna let it come if it doesn't want to come off easy we're not gonna force it but it's gonna raise the platform to remove flakes off obviously the top side when it's when it's time now this is one thing you're gonna notice too is when you finally get to where the platform is kind of built but you have maybe one more you want to remove it doesn't want to grab because everything is essentially you've abraded it with the flaker but you're like oh I have one more here I want to remove if you try to and it's just sliding off if you try too hard you're gonna snap tip off so you have to be able to look at this and say I have a little spot and you're probably not even gonna be really be able to see it but I have a teeny tiny little spot right here that I really want to remove a flake off of before I go on this side and if I push it I'm gonna it's gonna snap literally right here so instead be patient remove off this side because remember we were just spending this whole time trying to remove this turtle back so I'm going to remove this turtle back and then when I'm done I'm gonna come back and then remove that one little flake so a lot of this again is an exercise in patience if you try to do it all at once you're just gonna break it so this is one of those things where I want you to almost go in especially when it comes to pressure flaking I want you to approach pressure flaking like you're a woman that has delicate hands that's the best way that I know to describe it because if you power through it you are going to break it you need to look at it as technique a gentle touch and a removal of flakes and again that's probably why there was there was probably a lot more female Flint Nappers than we give credit for now I do have an enemy in the woman that the women at the time probably had phenomenal little muscles here and in their forearms more so than we're used to today but for the most part the technique builds the muscle and the muscle memory builds the technique so I'm removing actually these fairly decent little flakes just it with very little pressure I'm just rocking back I'm finding the perfect little tiny platform when I roll it together and knock these little flakes off that one didn't so pretty kicks it wasn't a good example scroll back and if you have to force it too hard like if you're grinding into it then your platform is not well established now I'm not saying you should just be able to just and knock it right off like it does take pressure but technique and pressure you don't hear me grunting and strutting in if you drop it you're standing a decent chance of breaking it if you're on the concrete floor luckily I just nip the teeny tiny tip off which is fine so I'm going to fix it but if you're if you're struggling and cramming this thing into your finger every time your platform is not well established you have to establish your platform if you want to remove good flakes I'm guilty of this I'm not gonna lie I see a nice little platform like this and I want to hit it I want to hit it with the billet and sometimes it works out I'm not gonna lie but you can see how thin we're getting on this piece it's it's where it needs to be this is where patients remember what I was talking about that gentle touch you look at what he said ah I want to hit this so bad because I can knock a nice almost like a little flute off of the side and thin this base but if I force it and hit that there's a very good chance it will literally break right back here so we don't want to do that what I want you to do instead of actually removing off that remember this side we want to actually want to remove what I want to do as much as the platform's already built we're going to pressure flake even more off this side in and establish this platform as much as we possibly possibly can so what it's almost like that grant remember I was talking about using the side of your flaker we kind of roll it and just crush the edge that's what I'm doing now I'm not forcing it I'm gonna crush everything off that once to come off if it doesn't want to just come off on its own I'm not gonna fight it now just because it comes off easy doesn't mean I'm just gonna keep working it in and and then but what I'm trying to do is remove material off of one side because this side is actually very very flat show you here this sides very flat it's very nice and this side means removed as you can see we have a nice little platform that's why I want to hit it so bad but I'm just developing this platform as much as I possibly can very gently like I'm just rocking my wrist right now I'm using kind of the pad on my finger is a fulcrum and I'm just just kind of just I'm not getting a big grip and trying to drive I'm just trying to crush like this not hard just I'm doing kind of the same thing the operator does but on a slightly larger level now when it's all done coming off we're going to abrade it and you can see the platform that that's made okay now we're gonna flip it over and this sides gonna go down like this and then we're gonna start on the edge we're not going to start right in the middle as much as I want to start in the middle where and start on this edge we're gonna rock it back we don't want to push too hard because we could still snap this point but we're gonna push pretty hard find that and rock it and drive that flake just like that and then I'm just a light a braid we don't need to abrade the crap out of it just a little bit same thing now instead of continuing to work towards it what we've actually done we have isolated this platform a huge amount and actually so much so this undercut and what I mean by that is it's it's actually got a little bit of a dish you can see the dish right here you see that right now it comes right across and then it dishes and then it's flat so if we actually try to write into it we could hinge it right here and it's one of the reasons we don't want to turn it over and just hit it with a billet because it's going to hit right here it's the energy is gonna stop and it's going to snap that point right there so that's why we don't do it now sometimes like if you're making a paleo point make it a Clovis you're gonna actually build a beautiful little nippled platform just like this and you're gonna smack that off to drive the flute but the problem is here like I said we have this dish well you wouldn't have this if you were doing a paleo point that just that's kind of an anomaly that wouldn't exist that you were doing that but that's a different lesson for another day so what we need to do is be very patient and we're not gonna try to remove this entire flake by itself it's not like we're gonna hit this and try to flute it and knock this big giant piece off what we're gonna do is we're gonna incrementally take a couple little flakes grind it off take a couple little flakes and grind it off take a couple little flakes and we're gonna eat this whole thing right away so we don't want to we're not trying to come in here and just be like cool I'm gonna latch on to this thing and we'll grip it and rip it in yank it down could it work sure it might work but we also stand a good chance of screwing up all the work we've just done for the last oh you know forty minutes or so so what I'm doing is I'm pushing that off and I'm working all the way across it so I want to show it to you right now the way it looks remember we had that nice little nipple hey there's a flake here there was a flake here it was a flake here so we're just incrementally getting rid of it now when I come back to it I'm gonna grind it off and I'm gonna come here again although I'm not quite to the end but right where it kind of meets the the rest of it right here I'm gonna pull it here and I'm gonna pull it here and pull it here and then it's gonna thin our base now notice I didn't sit here and just grind the crap out of it because it's gonna be hard to grip this thing it should knock it off I hit it two or three times just like that and now it's got just enough that I can grab it and I can drive the flit these flakes and what I'm really trying to do at this point I'm gonna kind it off because I want to rock it back and I want to get that big flake put some real pressure you don't want to drive a fairly significant flake off of it so I'm going to do that all the way across it and these significant flakes that I'm talking about are like they're three miles long I mean they're they're quite literally probably 3/8 of an inch long so that one's not even that big and you can kind of see it's that's probably that's probably a quarter of an inch so that's not a very long one but they're a ton of that again maybe yeah maybe a skosh more than a quarter of an inch I'm going to knock that off and come back and do it again again I'm gonna remove as many of these as I can until until this side is actually relatively flat now you can see what's happened here follow that centerline all the way up have you seen what's happened here our centerline used to be on this side right well because we've again removed these materials we've moved with the centerline to this side you can see how it's almost completely flat it goes completely all the way straight up and then this side is the one that bevels so what we want to do and we're gonna take our flaker and just crush this a little bit more not much just a little and then we're gonna abrade and then one of the things too I want to kind of point out this isn't always the case sometimes maybe it makes a difference maybe it doesn't I want to remove flakes off of this side so I went to just like I would if I was trying to build a platform I want to actually abrade the direction that I wanted to build the platform so opposite that so now I flip it over that I want to remove the flakes and I actually do think that that makes a difference so especially as you get closer to a finished product when you're ready to abrade like now and again I'm here I'm actually kind of making another little nipple I want to abrade away from the direction that I want to remove the flake so I was operating this way I'm gonna flip it over and I'm gonna remove the flakes down okay it's probably in about an inch and 1/8 wide if I'd take a guest's maybe a skosh wise for a hair point it's not too bad it's pretty good so now we're actually instead of just working this down to a point size that I specifically want this isn't a bad point to work with at this point let's go ahead let's notch it let's sharpen it let's get the job done so you can see really where we're at with this so we're going to take remember our screwdriver lookin thing what I'm gonna do because it's so so beautifully perpendicular here I'm going a lot of people really love these like Cahokia side notch type type points like this so I'm going to do not just here because doing corner notches is a little bit more difficult it's not incredibly difficult but it's a little bit more difficult so what I'm going to do is some side notches and we're gonna take obviously we're not doing it flat ways like this we're turning the flat head screwdriver looking piece up on its end like this okay so we're not trying to do this and nap down this way we're going to turn it this way okay and then I'm gonna come down all about 1/2 an inch or so and I'm gonna put right in like I want to remove a nice flake just like that sometimes it crushes sometimes it gives a nice flick now flip the whole point over push it in and remove another one now what I'm gonna do I'm gonna try to do this this is him right in so you can kind of see a little bit better what I'm doing let's see so you can see just a tiny little bit right there and what you do is I kind of I don't go straight in I go a little bit this way and a little bit this way and a little bit this and this is exaggerated but when I'm in the knotch I'm gonna remove like this way and then I'm gonna remove one this way and then I'm going to flip it over and I'm gonna remove one this way and then I'm gonna remove one this way then I flip it over so I'm going like this until I get that not eat it out now I'm not saying that you can't just get one flake removal and but that's the technique I typically use is there we go you've heard kind of let go now I'm gonna flip it over so that was the one that was going this way now I'm gonna go one that's kind of back to me okay and then I flip the point I'm gonna do one this notching is something that takes a lot of practice I'm not gonna lie if you want if you're afraid of destroying your point my cuz here we go here's here's how we're kind of starting on that it's a pretty decent little notch it's not in there very far in fact we probably won't do them very far because you're not just getting started you're not experienced enough to get this notch all the way to Center be happy with what you have at first you're not gonna be perfect from the word go but what I want you to do don't take a thick one but I want you to reach down in your debe Tosh pile and I want you to find a little flake like this okay nothing spectacular and put this one here for good safekeeping grind it off okay practice over and over and over even if it's the only thing you do for a whole night is before you ever not you point pick up debe Tosh pick up garbage grind it off and practice notching your demitasse just like this that's gonna teach you how far you can actually go in you see I actually kind of like made an e not you see there's like a little a little nipple right in the middle of that so we're move on here and we move right here and then we flip it over and we move one here we remove one tear and it makes this a little nipple in the middle and that's what we call a Nina watching the basics of an e notched point or an e notch notch is that there is that little nipple what people don't realize is that so you can grab better now what happens is you get too far this is gonna happen well I couldn't see it it blew up but cuz the camera didn't focus but I split it in half that's because the point or the little flake we had had no substance to support it now what we're doing is the same exact thing on her point so after you've practiced even I don't care if it's like said for a whole night you're going to work on notching your point and I want you to do a very small image one this way one this way and then flip it over one this way the one this way so again I'm going to show this to you this is an advanced technique but I want to show it to you because it's very important I want you to really focus in on this you can see I know it's very very very hard to see there is a tiny nipple right in the middle it's because I removed a flake off this side and then this side and that flipped it over and then I did on this side and this side and that is going to give you the best notching possible now if you do one side and the other side doesn't want to go don't force it if you brute force it you're gonna break it flip it over skip that side get that one to release and then try this out sometimes it crushes you hear that one crash that would kind of crushed itself through that happens to flip it over that one didn't want to go I got a teeny tiny Flake but not much so I'm gonna go back that one went just fine but you don't force that you try if it doesn't work do this one first then do this one see now that time it went flip it over that side went just fine and then that side now I want to show you this again this side is actually much this is a thinner notch but this one's deeper we have the potential to go deeper typically go what typically what happens is if you have one that's wider you can kind of usually go a little bit deeper if you have one it's super narrow it's gonna stall out on your pretty quick so anyway those are the differences between the notches is one better than the other absolutely not absolutely not whatsoever so anyway I'm gonna clean these up I'll probably I'll probably do is what I usually like to do is so if I have a wider notch I take the thinner notch and I just kind of eat it out and make it as large as the other one so it's very symmetrical like this and doesn't take much you just kind of chew on the sides a little bit and then I'll reach up into it and just kind of yank another one or two out no big deal and then you end up with something it's a little bit more consistent just like that and it's not perfect but it's pretty darn close so anyway let's take a little break and I'll come back and we're going to sharpen this thing up and then we are finished all right so we do have our point in its notch and it's ready to go we're gonna sharpen the edge now I am not gonna spend a ton of time explaining I'm gonna show you once or twice or two or three times whatever on sharpening this because I have a whole video on sharpening in which I basically just take like a rough free four of our flake and I sharp it aside and I go through the whole sharpening process I could literally do another whole hour video just on sharpening a lot of people will stop right here and they're like cool I got an arrowhead right yeah cuz I mean you look at it you know like hell yeah man I got an awesome arrowhead right now this thing is dull is all people but I pretty sharp and I've heard people be like well that's sharper than it feels I mean when it's flying it's flying super SuperDuper fast it's gonna it's gonna slamming that and cuts it listen if you can take this thing and rub it and it doesn't cut you it is not sharp I promise you I promise I'm not giving you a line to sell you on sharp points if you can't cut your skin with this it is not going to cut a deer any better I promise you so what we're gonna do is we're going to sharpen this point and this is not good enough you have to sharpen this before you hunt is that an arrowhead absolutely is it sharp it is not sharp it is not even remotely sharp so what I'm going to do and doesn't it doesn't matter if you start the tips where you start back here it doesn't matter usually I start back here and I like to usually do two or three now it's a good time also your your little pressure flaker that you have is we're going to sharpen that and so you take a get you a file if you don't have the file does not come in the kit but just go to the hardware store and just pick up a file of pretty much inside whatever is going to remove material and try to put a little bit little bit more of a sharper edge on that tip and I could probably work it down just a little bit more but I think we're pretty good where it's at now again it's kind of starting at the back of the arrowhead and we're gonna work up is we're gonna I don't want to braid really heavy you can if you think it's really soft you can or it's it's really kind of knife edge I don't want to braid the crap out of it but it doesn't hurt to just take like one or two swipes if you braid it really heavy it does get hard to remove some flakes at this point just like two hits I'm gonna start here and I'm gonna take one there and then I come up basically the same width as my flaker I'm gonna come up that far again and then sometimes you have enough you can take a third one up here sometimes not always and then we're gonna jump it we're gonna come down here we're gonna take one there and you're gonna do this all the way down almost one click sometimes the first click doesn't go it crushes grab on to it and do it again and then and again so pretty much every single you can see how it's we're doing this so every time I remove a flake here I'm gonna skip basically a flake as a mountain go here and then here and here then we'll skip it here here so if you do them one after another all you're gonna do is create a straight edge we don't want a straight edge we want a serrated edge because if you're watching that video I explain how the serrated edges are just absolutely devastatingly sharp so anyway once you go all the way down on one side if when you get to the tip don't manhandle it cuz you were gonna snap that tip right off you want to put it right on the edge and just very gently tick just knock it right off you're gonna break tips off as you learn to do this you are gonna break the tips off your heads and it's not a big deal just rework it the important thing is that you don't end up making an arrowhead that comes up to a round point you want to be very sharp on the end now we removed all these little knots the wrong side we moved all these flakes going this way on the camera it's coming from me to you so we laid it down like this and we removed all these little flakes all the way this now we're gonna turn it over and on the inside like here's a good one here to show on the inside that's where we're gonna remove a flake the other way so here I'm not gonna go on the tippy tip of it because we're using that as a sharp point we're gonna go on the inside and remove another flake all the way down the same process that we just did we're to try to give it just enough pressure we're not trying to drive a big long flake we're trying to drive a small flake but we want it we don't want to just crush what I could come in here just go that's not what we want to do what we're going to do is put it right on there and just go very simple one little flake and then we're gonna just keep moving all the way down inside not on the tips remember inside the same little serration that we already made if the first one doesn't let go go do it again you know just go ahead and keep hitting that and then very light when you get to the tip and the tip on that actually worried about being in the serrations probably like the last probably last half an inch or so towards the tip you can see I'm not trying to make serrations because I want to make something that's really sharp that goes in but you see the little serrations we've made now there's a difference between grinding in serrations just where you're just like and them not being like you should literally be able to take this and it should grab your skin that's not even sharp enough yet okay but it's close it's very sharp but it's not sharp enough so what we're gonna do is we're going to take it back on here and we're gonna kick a little click and of each one very gently and this does take so much practice you're never gonna be able to just be like the first time I'm ever sharpening an arrowhead I'm gonna it's gonna be super duper sharp it's like you could spend as much time practicing two sharpening an arrowhead as much as you do making one so that's why it's not a it's not something you're gonna watch this video and be like one now I'm a master at this I can make an it's gonna take a lot of practice so you can see this side when a lot of people stop this is not a sharp Arrowhead on this side but this side quite honestly is violent like when I shoot this through a deer it will grab a lung tissue cut it and yank it out the other side like it's shot and if you have ever seen the videos I do I've actually got quite a callus on here because I do this all time I test my points on the back of my thumb because I can't feel them here a lot of times people go like this I mean with the calluses and stuff that's on my fingers I can't I can't feel this at all because my fingertips are almost dead because I do this stuff for a living so I test on the back of my hand where it's sensitive and you can feel because it hurts it'll catch you and cut you and I'm just gently touching it and just doing this sometimes I end up but you can actually see it right there if you can or not you can see right there I'm actually starting to have a little drop of blood that's appearing so I'm just doing this and it's cutting it you're just gonna sharpen the tip now when I come down to doing the tip the very tip a lot of times again people still you don't want round it at all you don't want it broken off you want this thing to come down to a needle tip so when you essentially push it like India you don't like right now it's not bad I can actually push it into me and sure if I shot a deal with this it might be okay but the problem is you're taking energy away from the shot air every time that you try to shoot an animal with the point that's not super sharp you can tell that that's sharp but you can also see that there's like a micro little flat spot so I can I can do this if I did this when it was a really sharp may not jab that thing right into me so what I want you to do was lay it down you take the side of your flaker and very gently almost massage the side until you get these teeny tiny tiny like I don't even I can't even express teeny tiny tiny flakes you're talking about removing dust essentially off the side and I'm not going far not going far let the camera focus here come on camera work with me there we go I'm not going all the way up I'm talking from here to here and I'm just almost very gently you can hear it almost just ever so slightly OOP one little teeny tick right at the tip it's almost scary cuz you're afraid of breaking it then once it's super duper like that's not even quite good enough but what I'll do is I'll use the abrade er and if you're gentle you can actually abrade that little tip right on and if it's not on there just go back and do it some more it's not sharp so yeah like this is pretty sharp but if I can jam my finger on it doesn't get me it's not sharp enough that's the difference between doing it really good and doing it that's okay kind of good camera focus one more time we are almost done and you can see now how devastatingly sharp that tip is right I mean that is as sharp as you will ever get it that thing is great like when I touch it with my finger you can feel it grabbing my fingerprints that's how sharp that is you can literally see it grabbing I'm barely touching it and it's grabbing and pulling my finger very very sharp so now we got the sides that are very sharp it will literally cut me that's why you have to have all these big beautiful calluses that your wife alike so you have this scary sharp serrations in this needle sharp tip you can see how absolutely sharp that is so anyway thank you for hanging with me with this ridiculously long amount of time because I wanted to show one more thing one more thing real quick ouch myself when you get down to the base side where yet where you are gonna mount it just hit it with your braider just the back because there's no sense in having this super sharp where it could potentially it's not super important but if you don't and you don't want to dull up here just right here because this is where you're gonna mount it into the arrow shaft this is just like this but you can see how absolutely it's perfectly thin beautifully shaped it's actually a little bit bigger than what I normally like very very sharp very very sharp that'll need a point this is a killing point I hope that you enjoyed the very very long instruction on making this point and I hope I genuinely hope that this helps you in your flint knapping remember all this stuff while you do not absolutely do not need to buy it from hunt primitive comm I do appreciate your support but anywhere you get good rock good napping tools the important thing is you're out here doing it so we'll catch you on the next adventure

Channel: undefined

Views: 337,377

Rating: 4.8399634 out of 5

Keywords: flintknapping, beginner knapper, beginners flintknapping, flint knapping for beginners, flintknapping for dummies, flint knapping, how to make an arrowhead, how to make an arrow head, an intensive breakdown of beginner flint knapping

Id: W5u4ttosEmM

Length: 104min 45sec (6285 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 20 2019