How to Make and Use a Stone Knife

hey guys Ryan Gill here with hunt primitive where we entertain educate and inspire and if this is your first time on hunt primitive channel do please consider subscribing because on this channel I really focus hard on primitive build how-to and or hunting videos just like this one and today I'm going to teach you because I've had a lot of people request that I show how to make my bison skinner knife now why do I call it a bison skinner because when we did the atlatl and bison hunting documentary this is what we almost exclusively used with the exception of some raw flakes to skin and process the Bison but what it is is it is a double edged primitive utility knife used for both animals and projects now normally that the blade is a little bit wider and we're going to talk about this actually later on but this one's been sharpened down over a period of time because I use this thing all the time and I use it on everything I use it on wood on bone on antler on animals it is such a wonderful tool to use so follow along with us as we're going to teach you how to build a bison skinner just like this one just another note as we get started if you are interested in a bison Skinner and you don't want to make one but I'm going to teach you how to make one you can pick it up on my site hunt primitive calm and I will drop a link down in the description to that but we're gonna work on making it out of a piece of Buffalo River shirt I figured that's just too soothing isn't it to make a bison skin or a buffalo river shirt so this piece is not particularly pretty it's a little bit pretty there's a little bit of color in it but I just decided to choose kind of just a gray rock because to me it's a utility knife I'm not going to use it for anything other than using and abusing but most of this nut I would say 50% of the Buffalo River stuffs actually really pretty so you gots these reds and purples and yellow swirls and stuff going on stuff like this here these are just kind of Arrowhead sized pieces got speckles and swirls and they got a lot of color in it and it's actually really really cool raw and this is stuff that's he treated and I do actually at least at the moment we'll see how long supplies last if I continue to keep it or not but I do offer this rock on my website as well and again I'll drop a link down in the description and please forgive all my little ads because you remember I'm self sponsored all this stuff I do I try to share a lot of information but everybody asks all the time where to get this stuff so of course I'm gonna let you know where and we're going to be building all this with our primitive or Aboriginal napping kit and that includes all these different tools but anyway we're gonna go ahead and get on into the build so we're gonna work on the on the blade first and then we'll work on the handle and if you've watched some of my other napping videos I've gone through the complete process of napping and if you want to see a complete process of napping with these tools I will drop a link down in the description for that as well but also because now we're getting so many links in so many videos I have created a playlist that is going to be my Stone Age series playlist because believe it or not this is all coming to a head and there's going to be a great big finish at the end so I've made a playlist I'll drop the playlist link down in the bottom and then you'll never miss if you always click on that playlist you'll always see every video that we ever add to it so definitely do that because we have a lot I mean a lot of really cool stuff coming up in the very near future so anyway let's go ahead and let's get to breaking some rock but I am gonna skip through a little bit of the process on this one I forgot to cut it I was that's where I was heading with that I'm gonna skip through a little bit of this so you can go watch that other video on napping a little hand I said I did completely start to finish so if you want the tutorials on how to do it or if you want a tutorial start to finish on long like a beginners flintknapping video I have that too just gotta check out my channel flint knapping / beginners now that being said now let's get on to cracking some rock we're going to work through this nap a little bit different than we that I have on other ones because I want to show you a little bit more of an indigenous style of napping not so much focusing on sitting in a chair even though they could very easily sit on a log or a rock and nap like that that's possible but I know there's a lot of primitive culture that sits like this and of course I do not possess the genetics to be able to sit flat-footed unfortunately but I can lean up against here and we're gonna do a lot of sitting like this and working and so hopefully you'll be able to grasp the concept a little bit more so of how primitive man would have probably been in a position to nap to make points and blades and such like that so that's the reason that we're doing it in this manner so first I'm going to be starting off with a little bit of hammerstone work I've got my tools sitting here I mean just kind of get comfortable into this and they do switch positions here when you get a little bit there we go I think that's pretty good for now you should be able to see a little bit of what's going on like this and it's not actually terrible terribly comfy for me to sit like this but we're gonna do it anyway so I'm gonna start off with a little bit of hammerstone just to do some rough spalling anything that I pull off like this to me there's an arrowhead net a little air how to always save this stuff always unless it's something like this it's just a little teeny tiny and curled and I can't get anything off of it and then that's when I pitch them aside but if I can use it like that and there's an arrowhead in that one when I saved that one and just kind of work right through with a hammerstone and we've seen before when I operate a hammerstone usually it's on my lap just like this and I'm holding it obviously like this as I'm working down if you need to know everything you need to know about like the angles and stuff that's where the beginner flintknapping video would come in really handy this is not a breakdown of absolutely every angle that I'm hitting I just want to show you what I'm starting with what we're gonna end with just skip through quite a bit of this in the making the blade but we'll show you some of it especially getting started some good highlights along the way so if you've seen you know a lot of these other napping videos I do they're they're very great tutorials on why I'm choosing the angles there's a good flick right there why I'm choosing the angles that I'm hitting and that's what the beginners flintknapping video is for but we're not going to go through all of that really the focus of this is I want to show you a little bit of progression maybe a little bit a quick time-lapse work nothing too fancy video editing wise but just show you a little bit of the progression what we started with and our finished product blade but I think moreover you can go watch videos on me making points so that's not the emphasis here the emphasis is going to be mostly working through the handle and the attachment and talking about the knife but I did really want to lead off with showing making some of the blade because inevitably some people are going to find this video that I haven't seen my channel or haven't seen my napping videos and they're gonna run right into will you skip I don't even know how you made that you skip the whole part so because of that that's why I'm making mention that there's plenty of other videos that I've done to see in detail how I make these points are these blades or whatever it is you're trying to make and that's kind of an interesting fact within itself too is a lot of these blades when I talk about this a lot more later especially in a different video but it's really important stuff is is like I said that this one's already been narrowed down quite a bit and that's because I've resharpen it over and over and over and it was a lot more bull tongue well-rounded when I started and now it's more lancelet shaped so it's actually starting to take on more the appearance a projectile point rather than a knife blade but that's really anthropologically important because it's you look at an artifact and say well look at the edge geometry or the tip geometry on this on this piece this was clearly made to be a projectile point and that's even the way that I thought about this for years until I started really working with these Stone Age tools and watching the progression of how they are made and how they are used and how they are sharpened and resharpen and how they change shape all the time and it's so amazing to see the progression of them because if you found this without a handle and it was nothing but a point you pick it up and say that's an atlatl point that's a you know it would be a Dalton shape is essentially what we're shooting for it's what's on the inside of this hash there's adult bass and you would say that it was a Dalton projectile point motion in reality this has been used as nothing but a nice keep that in mind super super super interesting stuff as we move along so can't always judge a book by its cover nice hammerstone work really really really really nice this buffalo river shirt is really really nice stuff when it's I mean even wrong it's actually really really nice but heat-treated it's just gets a certain creaminess to it we're just about getting to by faced out here you can see right so we're not completely there yet but you can see that I've mostly worked all the way around it I'm going to take a few more flakes off here I'll spin it over I'm going to build a platform and I'm gonna remove this part in fact it's probably what I'll just go ahead and do right now so as you can see it's mounted up I haven't bi-face that site at all so I'm gonna fire this edge the camera stone and again if you've not seen that video you know if you don't have all these tools that we're going to be using you can actually get them on my website but I know most people usually prefer to make their own Aboriginal napping sets but I also am acutely aware that not everybody lives in a location in which they just have access to this material so if you are interested in it again you can find it on my website on primitive calm it right there we go Beauty great anyone right here a couple of them anyway I'm kind of on my hammerstone game today I'm doing a pretty pretty good job with it some rocks just work a little bit better with a hammer stone some work better with antler and if a tool is working for you don't switch just use that tool until it's no longer doing what you want it to do and then that's when you switch sound getting pretty close to actually switching because I know this is going to stop driving the flake that I want to really sue in fact we're kind of starting there right now we're starting to lose some of the alright that's that's a good time to call it I think a little bit now I want to switch to a freehand billet and right here in front that was a good one lost piece of a piece of it but a lot of that ran right across that was a good one another nice flake there and oh I see I don't have a good squatting genetic as you can see so I'm going to stop doing that for a minute by facing through this piece so see we're just kind of get a nice little buy face going and just showing you a little bit of progression still working on thinning it there we oh man that was a beauty that one it was good one there it was a very good one freehand antler percussion Beauty glad I pretty much just turned the camera just in time to catch that one try to take another good one here there we go that's a good one to see we got here you ran Ollie broke in half okay nice fleek removal we're just thinning this out it's really all we're doing remember with a with one of these knives is we don't really want to get it paper-thin either because then it won't it won't withstand some of the abuse that we're going to get it but if it's too thick it's not going to really be able to get into some of the places that we need it to get into when we're trying to cut stuff so kind of a happy medium there or you know kind of make whatever you can to the best of your ability and when you get to a point when you're making blades that are too thin you'll know because you'll just snap them oh oh man that's a nice low and look you love that love that freehand if you haven't seen that other video that I did on that make sure you go find it it's like the the appo napping tutorial that I did it's kind of like eye starters for a bow napping where I really talk about these freehand pieces because I'm just getting just gorgeous long flakes with these little stubby antler billets that's where I kick my leg up here and use the back of my antler time not the front not the pointy end but the back of it to the brush or grinding it off just a little bit so you get a little bit better platform like that oh there we go ran pretty much yeah about 3/4 of the way acrost good stuff good stuff but we're getting there you can see we're getting right into that buy face shape you can see where we're starting to take a little bit of mass off of it anyway which is good one of the things to keep in mind with a knife and this is a little bit of explanation for some of your your earlier larger points that maybe aren't is well done they're a little bit more crude is we need to you can kind of remember as you use a knife and you sharpen it down you're actually going to be pressure flaking sometimes even in direct percussion flaking and driving flakes more because you're sharpening the edge so if you have something like say kind of over here in the middle so this is a isn't I wish I kind of had this to show you earlier because I actually had like a kind of a turtle back or was it it was right here it was a turtle back on this blade at one point right here and it's not there anymore because as I started sharpening it down I got to a point where if I would have just continued to work it down to get to that turtle back then I would have been left with a very small blade but the reality is because I left the turtle back there and my blade was wider it never interfered with what I was working with but then whenever I got to a point where I chipped it down I got to a point where I had a nice platform and I was able to drive that little turtle back off and say the reason I say that is you're gonna see stuff that's like there's a little bit of a hinge step fracture there there's a little bit of a turtle back here I may still get that out but I may not and that's not super important so when you start finding maybe some of these bigger pieces like this would just be a by face somebody finds this is it's a non diagnostic by face meaning it has no traits to say what time period it's from there's no hafting area anything like that it's simply just a by faced preform but when you find some of these larger pieces that maybe have some imperfections that's another great indicator that it's more so used as a tool or a knife blade rather than a projectile because we don't have to get it perfect like there if there's a big step fracture a hinge it's going to stop penetration if this is a projectile point it's not a projectile point so there's no sense wasting the material if you understand what I'm trying to say so we can work through that later as we sharpen the point down if it becomes a problem later as the blade gets smaller then that's when we're going to take it down so does you have a piece and it's not a gorgeous made piece it doesn't mean that it wasn't a really useful tool but chances are if you have a piece that's got like a giant like a ridiculous turtle back or step fracture it probably was not a projectile point simply because that would be a point of resistance that would him hinder penetration a nice nice spot here really there we got it I just blew it to pieces but man that was a really nice one not so good and here's some of the dull clunky stuff when you hit it saying that you're not it's not a good solid here there's a ting versa clunk and that clunk is usually not a good indicator for a solid platform it's got a little higher ting to it so that way when it comes off we know there we get it's going to be a nice flake that was more of a clunk and what it did was it went in here and step fractured so you can actually play a lot of this knapping game by listening to your flakes as well beauty very nice very very very very very very nice all right now we're getting to a point where this was where you could get greedy on that like I said about being a night plate you see this hinge that's where I hide that clunky sound oh there right I was able to pop it off so to completely disregard everything I said or was going to say I'm gonna open this up just a little bit here in the back brush this down but otherwise it's a that would have been one of those points where it would have been okay to leave that because it wasn't going to interfere with the tool being used as a knife blade and and now what we're what we're going to start doing is starting showing a little bit more some of the adult Enosh features and that's where we start to concave the base of the point and there's a reason for that as well and you'll understand that more if you don't know what that is already from some of my other videos you'll understand more when we get to attaching it to the handle alright kind of have this one this one big ugly turtle back that's right here which not I wouldn't be concerned about it except that it's right in our hafting area so I'm gonna try one one good pass to take it off and so far no good oh you know what I got a good chunk of it there so that's good that makes me feel a little bit better so then let's go ahead and do that let's start working this hafting area down we don't need all of that material so I'll use that to build platform see what it did right there now it's actually looking very kind of Simpson ish for a point that's all these paleo style or transitional paleo points and that just raised my platform there we go knocking her off they're much much better much better that one's not gonna give give it up quick that easily yet though so it is kind of interesting that this this point is naturally it's taking on more of a Simpson style of paleo florid appointment it is a adult we're still going to use a lot of that same concave base technology like I don't care that much about replicating a very specific type of point what I'm trying to do is is create the best piece out of the rock that I can for the job that I'm trying to create and we're getting pretty darn close to it so that's what I'm talking about kind of being bull tongue ish and that is that it's thinner at the bottom and you have more of a round and this does come to a little bit more of a point but a lot of times your bull tongue stuff is it's just very very wide overall and that doesn't make a very good projectile point at all that really really makes a great knife a great knife very good alright tell you what I think for our basic percussion we are just about finished might might try to get one more right there pretty good overall a little quick cleanup to move into the next stage on this piece it's really coming out quite nice alright so now we're ready to get back into some indirect percussion and what's interesting that's one of the reasons I wanted to do it like this as you can see when I was sitting in a chair before and holding my indirect percussion stick which is just this here and it's tucked up under my leg I'm sitting in a chair which which is fine and it works great you're probably not terribly anthropologically correct but squatting more like this certainly is and what's interesting about it is of course just like working in the chair anyway is I can actually move this thing aside and I can continue to be here and do my nice look like do my percussion napping I mean I can even get some really nice hits with this thing just tucked up out of the way and then when I need it I can swing it back in and use it so just because I've switched to this doesn't mean that I don't I don't do anything except this I can switch back and forth and then of course I'll have my antler time that I will still brush with and I can do all of this stuff and I never have to move so it said this is probably just a little bit more correct for the stance in using a tool like this rather than sitting in a chair and so we're just set that right up on a platform that we want and then this is where either having a bone or just another antler billet one that I don't normally use that much I can use for this and I can knock some really nice indirect percussion flakes off with this moose antler indirect percussion stick which of course you can get those at my website as well but and you'll find that I've know I've mentioned that before is normal deer antler I typically just break deer antler really fast moose antler is so much tougher now you could say well what nerve Ryan what did they do in the instances of places where say moose didn't live well you can use deer antler but you're going to have to hunt around and you're going to have to find those absolutely perfect pieces that have no pith on the inside because if it has pith that means it's relatively weak just like when we're building these indirect percussion billets or not interacting with these direct percussion freehand billets if it's got pith in it I don't want it so that I use that for something else but the napping tools I don't want any pith at all and then if you're talking about paleo times even into archaic times when they probably still had some salvage ability for ivory because ivory is exceptionally tough moose antler is the closest thing that I have personally found to the strength of ivory and it's still not as strong as ivory and I do have some mammoth ivory that I've been playing with quite a bit that was taken out of the permafrost in Alaska so I've done some pretty neat stuff with that it's a little bit more neat stuff coming up - so hang with me on some of that cool ivory work but anyway I just told you all that to basically just tell you if you make one of these at home and you just use any normal random deer time you may find that it snaps too easy we're gonna ship like you could literally chip a huge chunk off that's usually what happens if I just use whitetail antler but the moose antler I'm not saying you'll never break it but if you set your platform up well and you don't beat the crap out of it you'll get a lot of use out of that moose antler and you just get these phenomenal flakes that you couldn't get with pressure flaking and you'd be hard-pressed to get them with percussion because they're in a little bit too tight but you'll get them really good with this indirect percussion like really good and you know you're not really seeing probably many of the flakes that are coming up pretty much every single one of these hits is throwing a flake off I don't know if y'all can see them or not I mean they come off pretty pretty hard pretty good so now we're actually getting down here we lay our piece is looking quite nice for our knife blade I mean I said I'm not worried about trying to finish this thing off to be this this gorgeous point piece to go into a display case just don't want to kill it with detail now we can start using the tine end to actually remove some very strategic little flakes getting ourselves right into a position to start creating the edge of this blade getting right down to this side you can see how the edge is a little bit more front remember we talked about before about having like I mean it's not a big issue it just looks like it almost looks like a big giant flute but that's just a natural piece from spalling the rock and that we left it but this is our side you can see that the edge is a little bit more refined right it's not quite as rough and jagged so this side is actually done at least as far as a knife blade for what we're concerned and I can sharpen it out a little bit more if I want to do some flush work but it's actually quite sharp the way it is so I'm not gonna push it I like it in fact I may may come in and just take a few more out I'll feel the edge right here is nice and sharp you can see it's got a couple of serrations and I'll probably sharpen just a tad right there and then up at the tip it's actually sharp too but I won't even do that till it's in the knife and then on this side you can see that's not it's you can just see the sides a little bit more cleaned up than this side here so that's what I'm going to do is I'm going to clean this side up to match and then we're going to do a head go ahead and do the base of this and then we can move on to putting in the handle they´ll and fortunately my pop beer off the bottom it really does have a very interesting Simpson ish look to it doesn't it but I pop the ear off of this side right here an accident while setting up a platform because you can see there's a little bit of a turtle back kind of right here this is actually the point where I'm essentially gonna have to almost somewhat flute it right here because I have a high spot I could work around it but I have a pretty confident that I can get that off but I was setting that platform up and wasn't really paying attention ended up popping that off that's not the end of the world I'm not gonna let that broken ear dictate the success of this knife blade at the end of the day it's a knife blade even if I knock the other one off but in all honesty I'm just looking for a hafting area now put this on to remove material so what I'm doing is I'm setting up a little bit of a platform to try to drive it still doesn't want to come off that's a problem I'm running with here set it up just just a little bit more but having that concave base is a very good thing and I'm going to explain why so that's why I'm so very interested in in getting this piece off because it's just gonna help us later in hafting because believe it or not removing stone is actually easier than removing wood let's see [Music] there there we go certainly didn't get all of it but I kind of almost shot a little flute up it see it that's what I was essentially trying to do and that's not too bad I'm gonna try to get one more little piece right there so did I screw up and bust a year off yes I sure did but it's not gonna change the functionality of the blade in itself because when it comes to hafting a knife blade pretty much the glue is doing all the work so I'm gonna glue this into a handle the the glue is gonna be really what's holding it in any of the bindings that we're going to use basically add a little bit of secure to it because it does shrink down but then if we break the glue loose and we're not paying attention we're not walking along and I suddenly lose the blade that's essentially what the sinew is for but I think we're at a point right now on this that was actually turning into a pretty nice Simpson point until I busted the the base off I'm a little still a little bit butthurt about it honestly clean that up just a little bit more like I said if we would be down it's a two to two points on this okay if we're gonna use this as a knife then we can either have it the way it is and not care or if we want to let our OCD and perfectionism which I struggle with a lot I love things to be correct not have this little ear on here means nothing for the capabilities of this piece being a good not only a functional but a good knife so I can't let that stop me so when you may find an artifact that is actually a quite nice artifact then there's just a piece broke off like that I mean obviously it happened on accident but it doesn't mean that it happened after it was used because in this situation were broke and if you would look at this you can see where it actually snapped off I don't know if you'll actually be able to see it or not let me hold it up camera focus on it you can see where it snapped off and actually drove a flake down here so it looks like oh it was dropped or it happened in the half torso it happened during the manufacturing process but I'm gonna use the thing anyway so really what I'm gonna do is now I'm gonna come back here I don't need this but it's gonna help to have so I'm gonna doll this up it all the hafting area and we're gonna go ahead and get a handle together and we're gonna basically have ourselves a bison Skinner now remember the shape difference that we're really looking at here as you can see that this one's much more bull tongue that's wider and this one started off very similar to this one very similar but over a period of time when you start chipping down this edge trying to resharpen it what you're going to see here in a minute that is how you end up with something that's more straight edged and streamlined and then once we do get to a point where we have exhausted this down to to where there is really it's too thin it's too small I'm not going to get a great knife knife blade out of it I would take this out of the haft sharpen it up and use it as a projectile point because essentially it's already really well-suited for that but there's still plenty of life left in this I'm not ready to take it out and discard it yet now if I needed a projection point and I made a brand new blade just like I did now there would be nothing in realistic terms in in in prehistory that would say cool I just made a new blade we've been going ahead and heat this and take this out I'm going to use this as a projectile and I'm gonna put this blade into this handle because the work is already done the handle is already notched but if I do that which would be anthropologically correct I'm not teaching you how to cut out the handle so realistically had I had this knife this would now probably for me turn into a projectile point and I would be replacing the blade with this one and we would live happily ever after but we're not going to do that because quite honestly maybe this knife still has use but I need a knife for or somebody else for another person in my tribe and so we're gonna build a whole new knife without disassembling this one that's what we're doing right now alright first thing that we are going to do is we're gonna sharpen this bison skinner because we're gonna use this one in aiding the making of the next handle so what I'm doing is just removing a series of flakes to expose new rock now if said this started off much larger at one point but every time that you want to expose new rock you're making the blades slightly smaller and that's exactly what we're doing right now that's just what happens when you're trying to sharpen your blade now you can sharpen these things really about dozens of times and I have sharpened this piece over and over and over again and I'm just chopping it yet again and you don't always have to sharpen both sides sometimes just one side is sufficient and that's also sometimes how you end up with these single beveled points or blades is their only sharpened on the one side and then they're flipped over and they're sharpened I'm not a big fan of the single beveled stuff so a lot of times whenever I sharpen if I start to create a bevel on one side I flip it over and I actually intentionally remove material from the other side because I don't really like the bevel for the work that I'm doing so I intentionally erased the bevel you know about every other time that I sharpened it but that doesn't mean that other people do or other people did in history because there's a lot of points and blades that are bubbled so we're now to a point where we've got enough of a fresh edge in fact I'm gonna just maybe teeny tiny bit more and I'm not looking for a superfine serrated edge like I am on a projectile point because I'll break all those little serrations off but on a bleed like this that's gonna be absolutely perfect we'll be able to go ahead and work on our wood projects from here jammed a nice little fully creating my finger stings now it's we've got our blade that makes a concave base that we've got going on here and interesting little flute and so what we do is have a piece that we've cut off just like this so I got a nice little piece of cherry wood and that I really like this stuff it's just it's kind of pretty to look at I like the bark and stuff on it so and it's a good diameter this is actually dried and it's seasoned already so I just cut a whole bunch of this kind of stuff so I'm going to cut we're gonna have to write into that so now we're gonna move on I'll show you how to kind of process that off but it'll be the same same way for cutting this side obviously as it is the sighted we want and I'm just gonna hold this up and just choose how long I kind of want the handle to be or to put they're good enough keep them on that take the Bison Skinner and I'll just score it and that marks it and then I'm going to bring the camera in close really close so you can see what we're doing again that's that was our score line and now what I usually do is I don't I sometimes you know you definitely see me saw like it depends on how the blade wants to work I'm not opposed to doing that but a lot of times especially when I'm just scoring all the way around it's interesting you can kind of see how sharp that this actually so here's a bear piece of the wood right and I set it on one scrape and we've already got a pretty good score line so what we're gonna do is kind of score this all the way around until our lines meet up just like that so now we are looking at this now we are looking at this having a score line all the way around and this is side we're going to use for a handle now at this point since this is our handle side we'll hang on to that so it's easier to remember and we want it to break off a little bit flush so we'll score this in about as far as the knife blade will allow us to go so if you do have a thinner knife it's gonna allow you to score in a little bit deeper alright now we can we can take and we can actually cut this like if this is our handle we can cut in from this side and at an angle to meet this which actually works really really well if you haven't seen me do that in another video you will but since I have a little bit of a hand axe that's it's kind of nice I'm gonna lean on this and I'm just gonna chop that out instead you got to be careful cuz you don't really want choppier your handle side up but this way you can just kind of remove it a little bit faster and the reason we want to do this is because we're trying to make it recess that the tool that our our knife can actually go down into a little bit more so we run there's too much friction on the side of the knife once you cut in so far and it no longer cuts efficiently and so what we're trying to do is create a little bit of a recess so we can get the knife in there a little bit further so it probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense to you now but whenever you try it you'll understand so then what we can do is the same thing we can just go ahead and take and recut in a new line if you got any place that you can literally just saw this any of those chop marks you can just saw them right down so I guess what I'm gonna have to do is I'm going to get you in close here really see what I'm what I'm doing here because it's really a fishing work so hang with me one second definitely a little bit easier on a rock than my leg but I wanted to show you how we're coming in at an angle we can just solve all this material out of here you can see how much material we're removing right down to our original line and if you just start that with that chopping rock you can finish it off with the with the knife blade now if you don't have one of these okay if you're starting from scratch absolute scratch and take the blade that you just made and you can do all the same work with it because you're essentially this is what you're making this for so you can make the handle with nothing but the blade so that's it's like you make a tool to do a job it doesn't have a handle yet but you can actually make the handle with the tool that you made to put on the handle see you mean just like that and it works very very well the difference is it's not as comfortable to hang on to as one you already have made and that's why we put a handle on it to begin with to make the job just a little bit easier but you can use it as a hand knife without ever putting a handle on it to begin with if you'd like here we go you see what we've done there very nice so this is the side that we're going to use as our handle so we're just trying to basically making it to where we can break it off as a straight edge but we don't don't necessarily want to break it off when we're just kind of rough cutting Greenwood it's okay to score it and then snap it but when we're using trying to make a finished piece if you snap it you end up with a lot of kind of damaged fibers in the middle and we don't really want that so we'll spend a little bit of extra time to actually cut it off the right way so you can see that you know a knife a knife and a saw pretty much one in the same in the primitive world [Applause] image kind of sit through it because I wanted you to see how how far we've actually gotten on that side it only takes a few minutes it's all it takes it's just a few minutes it's not like it's an hour job to sit and use one of these stone eyes it's because when you sharpen them they're actually quite sharp and this is dry wood this is not green wood so green wood goes even faster see see it's a great example right there how much material we can remove with one of these knives that's why these things are so valuable well you think I use them all the time there's such efficient little pieces and then you've got two blades so if you get a side that's starting to dole out you switch to the other side hang with me here just a couple more minutes we're gonna be ready to snap that off now we're close enough in the middle we're not really gonna damage the fibers when we break it boom there we go so how about that that's perfect right we don't need that piece this is gonna be our handle now we can do yes go ahead and take your brace and Skinner clean it little tip right off you can flatten this thing out you can use this this removes material really really well I almost use it like a wood rasp sometimes where I'm not getting a straight line I'm just I'm almost covering I'm not only going this way but I'm also kind of going up and down at the same time and I'm quite literally using it as a rasp and once you get it to that point actually cleans off pretty nice so you just like that side this side i ground off on rock a little bit like that which that doesn't take much time to do either but so there you go that's how you're gonna cut that now let's go ahead and let's cut the groove so we can set our knife blade into this piece all right so now when it comes to put in the groove I like to look for usually your piece of wood is a little bit more oval it's not used a lot of times you know they can't be perfectly round it's fine and if if your piece is a little bit more elliptical like mine like it's a little wider this way then oh just compare it to my blade and say which way is it gonna fit a little bit better and in this case I want the more the wide side to be where the is gonna be so look at where that's gonna be and I'm just gonna score a little line on each side so I know that's just a good starting point and then it's gonna be the same thing that we just did and we may even go back and sharpen this blade in another little tip that I should have pointed out but I didn't because I kind of jumped the gun and I wanted to show you ringing it off first yes if you have left this on you would have a longer piece to hang on to but like I said I just jumped the gun I was more focused on what I was going to show you on the video than what I'd normally do and that is yeah you know you have a longer piece well this is a heck of a lot easier to hang on to and you can lean on it you're gonna cut your groove so much easier if you leave it long ahead of time but of course I would did the bonehead thing and I did the order of operations backwards so here I am with a little stubby piece I have to hang on to and it's not the end of the world it still works I'm just saying practicality go ahead cut your your point here your blade groove Eddie first we're going to do is going to start on one side and we're working the knife back and forth like this not always down in the bottom but sometimes up on the sides there like I said like a wood rasp so I'll do that all the way up and down because for remember we have to have a little bit of room to actually get this bleed into this once we get into here a little bit further now how long have I just been doing this not very long I mean what am I only 15 I'm more than 15 seconds in but 30 seconds of grinding 40 seconds of grinding even maybe a minute one of these foot knives let's look and see how far I am already let me see that look how far that is I'm just about to a halfway point in here and that far so that's how fast this work actually happens stone-age work doesn't have to mean spending hours and hours and hours and hours to accomplish a goal once you have the right tools and that's why he helps to have the handle because if we were just using this we couldn't put the same force on it we would have to go a little bit lighter and it still works but that's again that's why we put a handle on this as opposed to just always using a hand knife because the handle allows us to have some leverage and some comfort and we can bury it in our palm like this while we're pushing and so now we're not just holding it like this and working because that's not as efficient as you think it works around your hand but you bury this that's why the handles are relatively short it's so important to tell you that because a lot of times you might say well I'm gonna make a longer handle on mine but the handles are a little bit short on this because you're gonna bury it in your palm and I guess sometimes I forget to tell people this stuff but this is what's really really important about this is I'm gonna bury it so you could hold it mouth my finger here man I'm doing everything in Reverse on the camera but I can hold it there with my finger and I bury it in my palm so a lot of times when I'm working this again it's buried in my poem so now it's in a straight line with my arm or almost straight line and I can add a lot more stroke as opposed to if I was holding it like this working it's much more awkward so that's why you're gonna cut the handle a little bit shorter so hopefully that makes sense to you why these actually have a slightly shorter handle than say like a modern knife that you don't work like this this is we use this in a sawing matter manner oh so so often so now what we do is we're gonna flip it over well go ahead and do the other side and our groove is off just ever so slightly that up that sides feeling a little bit dull to me so I'll switch sides my blade that's that's a little sharper why it's nice to have two cutting edges says one starts to feel a dull switch twice the work and what's between having to stop and sharpen and really coming together pretty well here so you can see this is the side we did first and how far we are in on it and so you can see the plan of attack that it's like a moment working at a triangle so it's a deeper in the middle now I don't have to sharpen this again I'll get through this the rest of the way but what I'm gonna do is because I can tell that it's getting dull and remember last time I I know I sharpened it the other way so I'm gonna set it down and I'm just gonna do a little liven liven it up of the edge not necessarily a full sharpened but I'm gonna come in and I'm gonna knock the high points down so like the little tops of the serrations that I had before I'm gonna use those as platforms to drive a couple flakes off so we're having a little bit of a new fresh edge because if we're trying to be efficient there's two different ways to be efficient one is to save our tool and use it dull about as long as we can and the other method of efficiency is to make the tool as sharp as we can and not worry about the life of the raw so we can accomplish the job that we want to so you're gonna have to make that decision for yourself would you rather your tool last longer where'd you ever get the job done faster cuz it's a trade-off and you're just gonna have to make that call for yourself and in this situation I want to get the job done a little bit faster and now my blade is sharp again now you'll notice once you start getting down to this point I want you to look right in the middle you had kind of like a peak so you can see it's it's chewed out on both sides but it Peaks up in the middle so if we stick the blade in here I think you'll be able to understand a little bit see how it starts here and it gets a deep and then it Peaks right here because that's the direction of the blade that we follow it's same thing here so we can't we can't put it in yet but I want you to understand some of the reasoning behind the concave base especially in say like a Dalton point especially is it's going to fit to where our ears can reach over the top and have a little bit more bite so that makes sense and it'll but we need to still sit this in a little bit further because what happens is right now it's still not a problem I can get in here and we're gonna work all this down and we'll probably work it into about here but once you get to that point where now the knife no longer really fits like once you get down in here far enough the knife no longer really fits and you're still gonna have this peak but the peak is gonna be lower and that is gonna make up the difference of how this blade sits as opposed to on the inside of the groove on the inside of it here instead of it being perfectly flat the way back to here and we're having a flat blade it sits in which is which is we see that two with different things like maybe a Dinah's or something or not good you knows ok ku penis on some of this early stuff we're gonna see more of a concave base that fits onto a peaked ground out haften groove so maybe that hopefully makes a little bit sense to you as to why some of these points and blades have concave bases now you're gonna know exactly what I'm talking about when you get to a point get your knife really no longer fits in here just really look at this second so we're in here pretty darn far you can see how far we've come down actually a little bit further than I think it looks like on camera but you get to a point where see the knife the sides of the knife and everything they just don't really fit and down in very well and once you do that you're going to understand perfectly you work it this way as much as you possibly can but if you keep making it wider this way see it won't fit the point very well we're already just a teeny tiny bit on the wide side it's not that bad but that's how that concave base is going to fit down in there a little bit better and sometimes fits one way better than another looks to me like we could actually I think we can remove just a tiny bit more from the base of this point and it's gonna benefit us it's easier you're gonna notice you're gonna know exactly what I'm talking about when you do it you get to a point where it's so much easier to simply remove a few flakes of stone from the base like this than it is to grind out the wood from our handle and it seems so silly to think about but you're gonna struggle getting that last little bit of wood out and the best thing you can do and that's why especially this is it's kind of weird it's almost like a like a Dalton suwanee or Dalton Simpson mix it's kind of funny it just is what it is I just made a a piece to do what I want with but it's so much easier to chip that out and let it slide over the top of it and we still have plenty of surface area so half the handling see it's already got it fairly I mean I probably can't shake the crap out of it I mean you know I definitely can't shake the crap out of it but I can wiggle it pretty good and the handle doesn't fall off so it sits in there pretty hard as it is and so this is actually going to make a quite nice little knife cherrywood handle nice bull tongue and this again is kind of how they start out you know you want to make them to where they've got a lot more cutting surface because as you see how we sharpen it over a period of time you're gonna get a little bit thinner a little bit thinner a little bit thinner and next thing you know it's gonna look a lot more like this one instead of this one so now that we've got that going what we're gonna do I've been chewing sinew which is deer tendon and I got another piece over here in fact I'm gonna go ahead and start on it as well I'm gonna roll it a lot of times I roll it up if I'm talking especially and I'll just stick it in my cheek I suppose if it was a dip but I don't dip but and then I'll chew it a little bit later but now what we're gonna do is I have a little bit of fire going off to the side mostly it's just coals at this point and I'm just gonna heat it up I want to heat up the wood the hafting area because they don't want to shock it okay you can see a little bit of Ember on there and then I'm going to take my pine pitch and I'm gonna heat that up as well whoops man have a habit of breaking that thing on camera reach off and what I'm doing is I'm just coating this pine pitch glue in here really well really get this stuff hot it's just primitive hot melt glue made of pine pitch and charcoal and then you want to heat your the base your point just a little bit not a whole lot because again you don't want to shock it and then we're gonna really kind of coat that together and this glue should all still be pretty hot together I'll set that aside and then figure out if there's a way it fits better one layer than the other and I think this Way's the way that fits the best and I lift my finger so it doesn't stick to me quite as much you know it is sticking a little bit and I'll really cram that in to that hat and you can't do that if your fingers wet because it'll stick or if it's not wet because the pinch will stick to you then if you need more you know just heat up a little bit more pitch keep wiping it but but jerk a little bit against the clock because this stuff is is essentially hot glue I mean you feel free to make a mess of it I often times you do really wet your fingers up you know what I'm talking about if you use this stuff and you don't let your fingers it's gonna stick to you and you'll never be able to really pack it that's the important part in this is you want to be able to pack this wet glue into any bit of airspace that's in there before it dries just sticks TIA so you'll lick your fingers you put a little charcoal on them or something to create a barrier and it won't seem like it's a very tight fit at first it's gonna seem like it's kind of loose I'm telling you once this stuff dries and that's another fact - I didn't do it on this one just because it's it's not super necessary you can see on this one here kind of ground down a little bit in fact let me just the camera again it's getting dark on us here there you go you can see the shoulders of this are a little bit more beveled in and that's not a bad idea and I didn't do it on this one because they weren't real bad because you can see how these are I mean if this was a point on a spear shaft that's the worst thing ever because it would stop all your penetration but I don't really care on the handle of a knife that doesn't bother me in the least but once it's actually on here and it's a dry if you want to take this don't come in it from this way but you're going to come in from this side you can do this ahead of time too but it it literally takes like three minutes I'll just do one side here and then the other side I'll do off camera now Hale holding onto the blade it might if it's not dry enough it might still work around on it you'll see what I'm talking about and it's not necessary I just figured I'd show you how to kind of do it easy easy peasy because there for awhile I was taking it like on the end of a rock and I was just writing it and grinding it and it actually takes a fair amount of time to grind rock off as opposed to using a flint knife like this as a as like a wood rasp and see what we did there so we took kind of the 92-degree off and we just kind of rounded it a little bit and it's it's really just it's not even super important but if you want to do it that's how you're going to do that take that sinew that it was chewing on don't lay it in the dirt or on your pants where you're gonna have a lot of dirt especially because if you decide you're going to chew it again it'll certainly make a mess now it's chewing to pieces I might only need one now this isn't super important it's not like it's actually strong enough that the the pitch will hold it in on itself but the little extra binding actually helps with the sinew which is again it's deer tendons or any sort of animal tendons but this is from a deer and you can get the obviously two by the way you can get the pitch and the sinew on my website hunt primitive calm so you just go there and look under the supplies tab and you'll find it but we're gonna pull it you'll have to pull it super tight but I like to kind of bind it out pretty tight because it'll shrink on its own and hold itself into place now you just kind of bring it over a little bit like that no problem and then once that dries let's see it holds itself down it's got these natural glues but that's your bison Skinner right there now when you get one like from my website they don't look exactly like this they're a little bit different because like I said this one was a little bit more Simpson bull tongue ish which doesn't hurt my feelings either I don't care I'm just gonna take this thing out and use the dang thing when you get it it's gonna look a little bit more dalton ich most likely on the sides but you're gonna see pictures on my website anyway either way it doesn't matter it just this is the way this one turned out and I thought it turned out quite nice so that's pretty much your finished product so this is now a new serviceable tool now also once it's dry let me go ahead and boy it's getting dark on us pretty quick in it so once it's dry once it's dry then what we can actually do is take a little bit more of our pine pitch and just gently heat you don't want to melt the pitch that's already here it will soften up a little bit but just gently heat it sometimes you can lay it in the Sun but you got to kind of watch it because if you lay it in this too long it'll melt the pitch but you can gently heat it around the fire just to where this gets warm and then you take a little bit more pitch and you warm it and you can smear it right over top and I can't do it now because it's wet but if you smear it right over top of leaking see it on this one what it's gonna do is it's gonna help waterproof some of this so if you're using it on animals or anything like that you don't end up lifting the end because if you get this stuff really wet its it'll just soften back up and you'll lift up like one of these corner edges like this and then it's just annoying because they don't wants to unravel so okay now we got to re-wet it and put it back down so what you're gonna want to do is once it's dry set it you know out a little bit put a little bit of pitch gluten if you have hide glue you can use that too I'm not a big hide glue person I'm mostly likely most-most like to use pitch glue so I'll just coat my sinew in pitch glue and we are good to go so there we go thanks for following along we'll catch you on the next adventure please consider subscribing if you haven't already and I hope you enjoyed our bison Skinner knife build

Channel: HuntPrimitive

Views: 563,458

Keywords: how to make and use a stone knife, how to use a stone knife, how to make a knife from stone, how to make a knife from rock, indian knife, bison skinner, Stone age knife

Id: hGYOTQu57nQ

Length: 71min 23sec (4283 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 12 2020