Making a stone Dagger from start to finish

looks like something out of the empire strikes back however all i have is a chunk of flint which on one side looks a bit of a mess because it's got the cortex on and when you look inside that's a beautiful black stone the old platform that's there look this bit here is in pretty reasonable condition so i reckon that's worth giving away so i'll load the camera get on with the job and um we'll see what happens there i think you can see what's going on and i want to hit that right there [Music] when it was on target that but needs a little another little tap now that worked out pretty damn well but that's only a part of the problem you know because we've still got that to deal with all this thick section and this bevels over like that a little bit so let's get around the back of this first of all i'm going to turn it over this way and take that flake out all right and the reason for doing that is because now i can get right here and by getting there i can take all of this piece out it all come together and all these flakes look at them usually usable [Music] sharp as a razor blade and look you might not kill it all in one go but each time you take a bit that's a bit more of it gone climb up there a bit deeper [Music] perfect little i'd describe that as a cortically backed knife nice blade and because now you see this twist has come further across than the actual center thinking of the middle of the stone right here tilt it down so you can see one about there i should be able to hit it there and we're starting to create a balance between both sides of the stone turn that back again now [Music] this is just such a you can see everyone can you such a fine grade of flint there's not a lot of it but it's it's fine and sometimes that's what you need that that didn't work out because i kept connecting with the cortex the so things are going good and look you've got kind of um almost like a lion print on that cortex it's quite gorgeous so what we're left with here is a sort of heavy duty zigzag and that's fairly easy to deal with but because all we do is say like this one here tilt then that bit there we'll do a little bit of um a braid in here and the plan being is we take away anything loose and fragile so that's the solid area now and then we'll turn it over and we're going to smack that right there just bring you right in [Music] nice little blades for arrowheads what i'll do with them is i collect them and then when people order uh the little napping kits off me that i have on etsy [Music] i chuck them in because they're well usable for making arrowheads or i just make arrowheads myself whatever comes first turn it back so i'm going after this one now [Music] oh this is just a scorching piece of stone [Music] so it's flattening out quite nicely look so on this side literally it's beveling over that way quite hard as you can see that makes this quite hollow right because the flakes have just come out and this quite full so there's an order to things because i took all of the material out there then what i do is i make a new platform from this edge while i'm looking at the surface i'm about to name if you're ever going on a flint napping course either with me or with somebody else these videos are useful because it gets your mind understanding the procedure before you go on the course and that way when you do go on a flint mapping course you sort of get the picture a lot quicker so pay attention [Music] [Music] and there's not much there to go for so just leave just take one more there and now what i'm going to do is i'm going to deal with this side look [Music] just sort of passing through that cortex a bit let's use a bit more of this platform up just here that collapsed around that old bulb percussion like that but that's fine it's still got the length [Music] so i've been out this morning basically i've got up hooked up the trailer and went off to collect some flint there wasn't an awful lot i managed to find a half a trailer load of flint but it's not too bad stuff great for making hand axes and things like that but just obtaining flint in the first place at the moment is really hard because um we live in a time where you can't just dig a hole and the quarries um there's not a quarry that i know of at the moment that's really hitting good flint they used to but that's all right there are still places to go there's rivers that you can go to and collect flint um and there's areas along the coast that you can pick a few bits up all right what i'm going to do is i'm going to deal with this now and that's going to establish the length of this i'm going to come down to a lighter softener which is going to be see we're anchoring that round and getting down to the flint by removing that cortex i'm gonna have to lose a little bit [Music] yeah so there is loads and loads and loads of flint there but i said get into it sometimes i wish i'd become a carpenter or something instead of a flintlab at least you can see your material growing above the ground rather than hundreds of feet under it so this is going nicely just come up away a bit [Music] dodgy area [Music] worried myself a bit there i thought i was going to snap it in half that's what happens when you bounce off good i needed that flake to come off like that it's a bit of a start steep rise there so that's why things are a bit more tricky [Music] one of the reasons i actually nap outside is so that i'm not breathing all that dusting well i can't stand being indoors anyway but if you breathe that dust in in repetition that'll give you silicosis i've been napping since i was five years old and um i kind of braved quite heavy um but i don't think i've got silicosis and that's because my napping's done outdoors [Music] right so things aren't going too bad what's basically happened since we started is we've gained control of the whole thing meaning that there aren't any indiscriminate lumps that's probably a challenge right here but the rest of it is playing repetition of um taking flakes from one side setting up a platform then removing flakes from the opposite side and if all that goes smoothly without causing any hinges then there's no reason why i can't get a nice little dagger blade like i'm like i've set out to her for this a lot of the time when i'm napping what you'll be looking at is as i'm moving backwards and forwards with this hammerstone i'm sort of just building up the edge thicken it up so that when i do get a flake to come off it's got a little bit of meat to it [Music] all right what i'm going to try and do is i'm going to try and reach across here from this side rather than getting a flake to come through that side is just if nothing else i'll just take a bit of weight off the top of that [Music] so that's no longer an impending sort of like problem the nice thing about this because it's such a clean piece of stone get it thin enough you know light is going to actually travel right through the middle of it which would be um really awesome because it's got a kind of a brownish orangey glow and i want to have as little of this sort of fizzle ending flakes as possible [Music] it's almost the last little bit of cortex going there so it'd be fair to say that when you're sort of thinning and shaping you've got you've got primary flakes which are big flakes which are cutting across to remove the middle and then what you've got is you've got you've got sort of organization flakes which what they're doing is they're holding the sort of ovation the curve so that when you push in to take them big heavy flakes there's actually a swollen area to take from because if there isn't a swollen area basically the flake is too thin and it can't actually get out to the middle anyway and if it does it doesn't leave behind a particularly rewarding flake scar and that's one of the things we like about the finished artifacts is the look of the flake scars that are left on the surface so if they're all stuck into the material and they're not finalizers and finalizing themselves properly you don't get a good looking implement you just get a shape and when you're doing it you're passing through the moments so quickly it's actually quite hard to actually stop and explain each time whether you're shaping or taking primary flakes so but you might be detecting that with the eye anyway [Music] so this particular one instead of having a flint handle because the flint wasn't really long enough although it could be it depends on you know how you know you could have a knife like that quite easily but the um original plan for this is it's going to go in a wooden handle with a little bit of uh stinging little um binding around the wooden handle for basically to bring about a look about it more than anything else i'm gonna try and deal with this little lump here that went well it's always a bit scary changing hammers because um you get used to one hammer in the hand and then the next hammer might behave slightly differently um but it's good if you can get used to changing because a little soft hammer moves at much higher speed than a bigger one and therefore it can um give you a sort of a different a different flake scar to the finish [Music] getting the light through to the middle look [Music] [Music] you [Music] if you see a wasp come along you might see me see me run away into the fact that um my last two wasp stings have had bad reactions i'm now a carrier of an epipen and last week i had actually even had the ambulance here um never used to have a problem with wasp stings but apparently now i do and there's a lot of them about this [Music] year so this is coming along quite nice wouldn't you say [Music] um and there's room for me to bring this side across it and that will straighten all the order up so that one's come right over look and actually that flake's spread out and um pretty much done exactly what i wanted it to do you can see at the back of this flake so that's really helped out quite dramatically and probably one more oops that one has stumbled a little bit right at the back here that so you can't actually flake would have sat in there so now i'll come back that way to rectify that but luckily again what i've done with that flake is i've rectified that problem too so slowly what we have is we have quite a nice little flake plane coming together i will come and pick these bits off now you can take them to a shorter length just by tilting the flint down a bit and then sometimes right here what i've got is i've got a little bit of um a quite difficult little shape in there to be sorting out with um sorting out with a heavy hammer so uh what we do at that point we can do a little bit of adjustment with a flaking tool which is more organized than whacking it you can whack it but that just adds more um likelihood of snapping it or something something similar to that and we'll go back to this weight hammer again now good now i'm not overly going to push my luck with this because i know where it's headed this one's been ordered off of my website and uh it's a fella who's bought it for his son who's probably going to be using this quite forcefully and if i just make it too thin with his lack of understanding of how flint operates he'll probably bust it as quick as he quicker than i could actually make the damn thing so i'll try and leave a little bit of value of flint in the middle for him basically how it works on my website is um you can't just go on there and order a knife because i might not have time to make it so on the website there's a little section in the shop and you can apply to buy and if i've got the time then i'll accept the order and that's kind of works for me particularly with all the trips i've got planning planning coming up on the tip here i've got a little bit of a bumble let's just call it a bumble for the sake of argument basically what happens is a little bit on the thick side um and i'm probably safer just taking a few flakes off of the pressure flaker just there so a couple of them plunged over but i'm okay with that because this is slightly over length anyway it's coming along quite nicely right so even though it looks like a dagger now it's still a bit broader than what i want so what we're going to do is just continue to take that edge over they're all said and done the truth of the matter is this is a such a nice flake of flint that it's it's a joy to be working you can still screw it up any time you know that happens but we'll just try and take care so quite often what i'll do on um a knife when i'm making it is it might get finished up with pressure flaking um but if i cannot choose not to do too much of it because what you'll do is you'll disrupt the actual natural pattern of like these uh cast flakes and they're quite nice all by themselves hmm that's why i thought that one was going to stop right there uh you'd think that um most of the problems are out the way now but actually sometimes the finishing and getting the finishing sweep can be uh one of the hardest bits available so [Music] you try and bring this across a little bit it's um see that's the tricky bit you know you think you've got it almost there but it looks slightly out of balance and you can get balance back from several different directions you have to choose which one is going to work most effectively [Music] talk about nails on the blackboard hey good well the forecast was a thunder and clouds today and right now it's feeling totally tropical so with a nice bit of flint like this what it really would deserve is to be ground i'm talking like grinding an axe and polishing it to become completely smooth and then you could actually present a perfect flaky scar set on it that would really run the hours up but if i didn't need to make this knife for the order i think that's exactly what i would do because the stone itself is gorgeous but there's a little hinge there that was bugging me and i've just managed to get rid of it so let's just narrow down the back of this a little bit which is the bit that's going to go inside the handle you you stubborn a little bit you get little bits like that and basically if you looked at it microscopically you'd see exactly why the soft hammer wasn't passing through there would have been like a little crest presenting itself to the surface and um doesn't matter how small it is you'll just bounce off them and that is exactly the time when things get snapping in half so you have to be pretty careful all the way you this i'm usually leaking from blood but today it's sweat so this is my pot of pitch i need to be a little bit careful because it's on fire basically what i want to do gunk and fit that into that bit of wood i'll just let that set and then i'll put a little bit more in from the edges and then we'll bind it up so she's coming about and um next part is with all these stinger nettles i've been collecting i'm going to start the cordage but first literally these cool these uh nettles have just been drying so what i've got to do is um start stripping them down a bit and getting um just some finer pieces you it makes cordage a lot easier if you've got finer pieces of cord rather than thick bits otherwise you get sort of a well if you're making string you don't want great big lumps and bumps all the way along you can also run it through your hands like that using the fingernail or the thumbnail to knock off all the big bumps so it's not in it's not what i'd describe as rhett although it's partially rated it becomes very serviceable suitable for the job and then once you've got a bit to go then what we do is we begin the process of actually making the chord and literally what you're doing is you're pushing it until it begins to do this and if you just keep adding twists in you you're going to get a string but what we're going to do is i'm going to get involved with that with my hands like this i'm making a much tighter tighter and finer cordage right and i'm gonna need about three to four foot for this so um this is a nice way of doing it and once i detect that things are getting a little bit light on either side or a little bit short then it's time to add in and all you do with an add-in is literally lay that into the pack like so and twist it in and carry on with the job there we go so probably got enough cordage for the job there now i hope so because i've locked the knot off from the end and um here we go so i'm just going to lay part of that on the side there like that hold that down and then begin to wind that round there that'll go around three full wraps and then begin the descent i'm gonna go around that twice and then begin the journey back up getting them to cross over right in the middle so i'll get that effect on it which is quite nice and finally i'll just go through that and pull it up nice and tight which you can do if your nettle cords is cordage is good now the thing is i don't want any of that slipping about so i'm bound to um get the glue hot again coat that all in glue so it stays exactly where it is otherwise as soon as he gets it that's all gonna start getting moving about so i'll do that and then i'll show you a final finished product

Channel: Will Lord Prehistoric Survival

Views: 1,427,814

Keywords: Flint Knapping, Ancient Technology, Primitive technology, Will Lord, Bushcraft, Stone Age, Handmade crafts, Neolithic tools

Id: JWS-5JzUII0

Length: 48min 39sec (2919 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Gevorkj]

Interesting! Awesome how he is using an antler as a hammer

[u/JackFisherBooks]

Very cool! Thanks for finding this. 😊