We have now moved to the area of tools where we will be working with stone. We lived in the stone age for about 3.4 million years so you can imagine how important stone was and still is to us now. We have had a lot practice in developing our ability to work with stone and we now use it to store information instead of making knives, arrow heads or axes. Amazing how we took it from a hand tool to an information storage tool. In the beginning stone was used for axes, knives, arrow heads, armor, pots, bowls and traded for any number of things. You needed to know how to work this abundant natural resource if you wanted to get any work done back in the early days of man. The way people worked stone varied from grinding to chipping and their ability to produce varied dependent on the tools they had to work the stone with. We will look a little into both chipping and grinding to help make you better capable of surviving in the wild should you find yourself stranded without your knife or ax.
The 1st way we can shape stone is by grinding. You can grind a stone on other stones by placing sand and water on a larger flat stone and rubbing the two stones against each other. This works best if the stone you are using to shape the stone you want as a tool is much larger than the other and flat. Rub water and sand onto the larger stone to add an abrasive surface then rub the stone you are shaping against the larger stone. Once the large stone is muddy rinse and repeat. This over time will start to shape the stone to the desired shape which could be a knife, ax or even a plate. The 2nd method is chipping and there are a couple ways I have seen this done. The 1st is a crude smash method where you find a large rock firmly embedded in the ground and as flat as you can find so as to avoid any deflective or glancing blows. Once you have found this rock you will look for a large smooth rock to use as your crushing rock as mentioned before if this rock is flat it helps keep from having glancing blows. You then place a smaller rock on the rock embedded in the ground and smash it with the large flat rock to create shards that can then be used as cutting tools or arrow heads. It should go with out saying but be careful. Smashing rocks with rocks is a little dangerous. Watch that you are not going to smash your fingers or that a shard does not fly into your eye. Stone can be up to 400X sharper than surgical steel. Once again please be careful!
From here we will find a more pointed rock to use to chip the fine shape of the item. Simply use the more pointed rock like a wood pecker hammering at the rock taking down unwanted areas and notching the sides for binding notches. This is time consuming so if you are at camp fighting off boredom this is a good way to do that.
The 2nd type of chipping is on flint which breaks in a very interesting way and I will link a video I found of a park ranger doing this that is very cool. With this you start with a large stone and hit the out side to start a fracture and you will then start to flake off pieces hitting the edge of the flint until you flack it to the desired item. Flint is great to make tools out of and has its own style and rules for working the stone. Here are a few things to keep in mind on how stone breaks. 1.) To detach a flake strike the stone at an angle close to but not 90 degrees
2.) Every stone has an imaginary center line
3.) Flakes love to travel over convex surfaces
4.) Flakes love to follow mass they will travel over the ridges and lumps
Guys there is a ton more information on this topic and I will for sure be coming back here in later post because I know I have just scratched the surface of this subject but for now as I go out and practice and learn more you will just have to go to some of our friends for more info on this amazing topic as always thank you for your time and your attention. We hope that this has been useful to you. Please follow us on facebook or on the blog here at fiablognews
And as promised here is a link to the flintknipping
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