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.