Give me a rock and I'll break it.

Just used a hammer stone on this one. Even a cave man can do it.

Pretty cool. Is it finished?

Pretty cool, how long did it take ?

That is cool!

The best rock breaker I ever saw.....
Adios,
Gary

Impressive work. You got some nice large flakes off.

I can that with a copper-bopper or antler billet but my hammer-stone skills are not that good.

That is really neat

Some can be done pretty quickly. Depends largely on the quality of the material and the shape. GOOD knap-able stone will let you reliably strike off fairly large and long flakes without too much worry of breaking the piece. But shape also comes into play. In this case...the piece is already pretty flat (nice to have) and doesn't have any one large area of mass of reduce.

Just the same...it takes a little time to set up platforms, shear, abrade and strike.

In the right hands...a GOOD piece of material that size could be preformed in 15-20 minutes. But most pieces of material require some analyzing as you go...so take longer to avoid breaking the piece.

Awesome, wish I knew how to work flint. Know some areas I can find large (grapefruit-sized +/-) pieces and should start the learning process.

How long did it take you (HWY_MAN and flintknapper) to acquire these skills, or at least the basics to build and improve upon?

We've got allot of chert on the ranch, several ancient quarries, outcrops and where it's been cut into for roads and pipelines. I pick up what I find and stash it on a location back up the hill's, I make preforms there and mostly use hammer stones, when I get it home I don't have so much to have to clean up later. I'm still partial to antler and bone but have been using allot more copper lately. Made a Northwest Clovis about 8 months ago using only hammer stones, did a pretty good job on their overshot style flaking. That's all in the platform and hammer stone size, want big long flakes you got to have big hammer stones.

Knapped my first point back in the early 80's.

Awesome skill to have...

That’s really cool and it turned out great. Tell me you took the Rollie off before banging them together?

Great job!

Hank...the 'basics' could be learned in just a few days if you are interested in just making smaller points. The person who taught me (just enough to get started) was a student and friend of Craig Ratzat. He spent a couple of days at my home showing me the basic techniques but put a LOT of emphasis on understanding the WHY'S and WHY NOT'S of what he was doing. In other words...the concepts and principles involved.

Once you understand how the energy travels through/across the material then its a matter of practice. The finer techniques (notching, serrations) and such will take some practice. But you can learn to 'pressure flake' small serviceable points in a matter of days. Of course, you'll get better with practice. Your first points will be pretty crude. Percussion work (larger pieces usually) takes more time.

If a person were to attend a 'knap-in' and ask around...you would learn SO much faster than just experimenting by yourself. At the time @HWY_MAN and I were first learning...there was no internet or YouTube (late 70's early 80's). There was a smattering of written material and the revival of the flintknapping art was underway but nothing like it would become.

IF you can handle a little disappointment (because you ARE going to break some pieces that seem to be coming along) and accept that you will have 'plateaus' that you might struggle to get past...then just about anyone can learn it.

Use good quality material and know that some material is MUCH easier to work than others. I don't recommend folks start with Obsidian for instance, just good quality flint/chert.

Be patient and when you have failures ask yourself WHY? Was it the material (it could be) or your technique?

And on days when it just isn't working for you, put it down! Come back later...don't become flustered.

While notching a pretty nice Desert Side Notch point from some heat treated Agate....I wasn't paying attention to how hard I was gripping the point and snapped it in two.

My 'teacher/friend' was sitting beside me knapping out his own point. He could see the look on my face. Then he uttered the most important thing of that entire trip and I've never forgotten it, he calmly said to me: "It's just a rock, we'll make another".

That watch has been on that wrist for as long as I've been knapping, it's seen tons of chert.

Much of what you said applies to welding as well.

Kudos to yall, you can survive! I need to learn how to do this.

I think whatever you guys are discussing must be pretty cool - however I have no clue

Looks like a fun skill to learn but takes lots of effort - cool stuff