Heave Ho!

About a three years ago I read the book "Clan of the Cave Bear" by Jean Auel. It is a great novel depicting the life of a group of neanderthals who adopt a cro-magnon girl. The author spent quite some time learning the crafts of the people she meant to write about. She learned how to flintknap, make fire using a cattail stalk and clematis board, and use a sling. The slinging really stood out to me in the novel. In my research I found that the sling is one of mans oldest ranged weapons, and, in the right hands, can be as accurate and deadly as the book describes. Being a leather worker, I pulled out my supplies and braided a sling out of some black and red leather strips and a scrap of red top grain upholstery leather. The end result was a very functional and very pretty sling. My accuracy left something to be desired and after an entire day of hurling rocks at a target and hitting it twice, I decided to look up the proper way to use this weapon. I stumbled across Slinging.org and was amazed. There were not only videos about how to use a sling but tutorials on the construction. I found that because leather stretches, it is not the best material to use for slings. It will work if the leather is the right kind, but braided leather strips would not do. So I promptly ran to the store and picked a roll of jute twine. Again I set to braiding. The resulting sling was beautiful. sadly it got lost in one of the many sewage flood in my basement. Last week I bought another roll of twine and set to revitalize my obsession with throwing rocks.

Here is the release and finger loop of my sling. It was made using six strands of twine around twenty feet long. The finished sling is around five feet long with a split pouch. It can comfortably hold an apple.

 

Right now the weather in my area is not the best for being outside so when the rain stops and if gets further from the "just above freezing" mark I will have pictures of me using it.

Now, off to try to make a fire in the living room, if I can just find that cattail stalk my daughter was playing with... 

Place tongue firmly in cheek before reading

While learning how to knap I found that there is one thing I needed that I would have difficulty obtaining. That would be sinew. Sinew is made form the tendons of certain animals like elk and deer. I was looking for a package of sinew online the other day when one of my co-workers told me not to buy any because he had quite a bit at home. So we worked out a barter arrangement wherein he would bring me some sinew and I would provide him some liquid sustenance (two sodas). When I got home today I was very surprised to see something crawling around the field behind my cave. It was a Internetius Boxificus, or the web-based package, wandering around slightly out of its natural habitat.

Since I knew that this was a rare opportunity, I ran to the closet got out my bow and a couple arrows. I took aim and shot. Luckily my wife was there with camera.

I got it!

  

I really didn't want to waste anything so I pulled out one of the flint blades I am working on. There are many useful pieces in the package, just avoid any invoices, they tend to leave a bitter taste.

 

I decided to skin the box and stake it out to dry and then harvest the tendons therein. I hope you all enjoyed my very legitimate method of harvesting wild sinew. 

Rock on!

Caught Knapping

So a while ago for Christmas my Mother-in-law gave me, wait for it, a box of rocks!

I ask myself, "What can be better than a box of rocks?" A box of flint and obsidian! At the time I was heavily into archery and I thought it would be interesting to learn to make arrow heads from flint. My wife told her mom about it and at Christmas I got my rocks. The only problem was I had no idea how to do anything with them. The internet had several wonderful videos, but my computer was too slow to load them so I was forced to try to make heads or tails of the multitude of webpages out there. For those of you who don't know much about flint knapping it is not an "inside" sort of activity, and it was very difficult to look at my screen, run downstairs, pick up my work and rember exactly what was on the webpage. Luckily the library had a great book on the subject which I promptly checked out and on which I currently owe almost three years of late fees. I had the book, the flint, and the desire, but what I lacked was tools. In the town where I live there are several festivals at a park near the Missouri river, and one of these is a re-enactment of the beginning of Lewis and Clark's journey. There I happened across several pieces of deer antler, which made fine tools on which to learn.

Here is the tool kit I made/accumulated:

This is a deer antler billet I made for percussion flaking. 

This is my pressure flaker, this was made from an antler tine and a piece of poplar.

Here is the leather pad that I use to protect my hand while flaking. I made this out of some scrap leather I had laying around.

Here is my very (un)primitve abrading stone. This is from a stone age bench grinder wheel.










These two pictures are me using my billet and pressure flaker on some obsidian                                               

 And now all I need is ... Practice.