This was a special one! I had some North American Walnut & Palemoon Ebony left over… seemed rude not to! Paired with some Green Sheen Obsidian from Oregon USA.

Available

Lil doodle.

Tool collection i have been working on for the past 14 days

Thanks to gulf coast knapping and jack crafty. One thing I e noticed about learning to knap through YouTube is that everyone is an odd little duck lol. It’s been so much fun though.

This is my first attempt at one. Also my first time using a punch. Super fun.

Almost impossible to capture a clear glass point with a photo!

First one back after being away, I’m pretty pleased! It’s not the best but after not knapping for three weeks or more I’m pleased to get one finished

I have some flint pieces a knapper or ideally someone learning to knap could use.

I took up the hobby for a bit, need to downsize, so free. I can probably drop it off in fact.

Hello hello everyone! 👋

Got some obsidian points here for you today! Been a good while since I've messed with it because my stone abundancy switched from having a bunch of obsidian and hardly any stone, to an abundance of stone and less obsidian 😂 So I've just stuck with rock! Didn't stop me from cracking into a few of these pieces. Also made my first drill out of some Mexican Spiderweb obsidian! That triple-flow stuff was slightly horrid too. Abrasion would result in these little needles that loooved to stab 🙄 But in the end I'm quite pleased with everything!

Plenty more to come, so stay tuned, stay safe, and happy knapping all!

- u/SmolzillaTheLizza 🦎

I spoke with Pete Bostrom at the Lithics Casting Lab today and sadly, he said he's probably done casting...too expensive and not profitable. Any recommendations on an alternative casting company? I have a couple of artifacts I need to cast.

I have several hundred inches of preforms available from some High-Silica Rhyolite out of northern AZ. Some of it is thin enough to only need pressure flaking, some is a little thicket and could use some reduction. The basalt looking stuff and the grey obsidian stuff are from the same lava flow, one just cooled faster. First photo is some of the points i’ve made from it. Shipping cost varies depending on how much. I’m asking $2/in. You will get a mix of solid black, and grey stuff. There are several banded grey/black obsidian pieces as well that will be randomly thrown in the mix. The grey stuff makes up about 8% of the lava flow, with the banded black and grey probably closer to 2%.

Disclaimer; the stone frequently has phenocryst present. The majority of the time my flakes go through them no problem, but occasionally there is a hidden monster phenocryst that can give you trouble.

If you prefer just raw stone, I have enough for several boxes. I also have hundreds of lbs of other juicy AZ material as well if you want some color. (Last photo)

Selling some stone to help prep for my baby due around the corner.

When I started working this flake I was looking to make a Cahokia. The thinning went really well (final thickness of 3.8 mm) and I figured I might as well push it as far as I can.

Sometimes changes that seem small can have a massive difference in outcome. This was the first time I wrapped the holding end of my copper indirect rod with a pad of leather. This one change allowed me to drive much better flakes and get a much better end result. You should never stop trying new ways to do things, even if most of them don't work out, you never know if the next one will help push your craft to be the best it can be.

I recently learned about a wheat threshers that use flint blades. I've been knapping for 30 years and never heard of this one before. Thought I'd share a few pics of one I just stumbled on on Instagram. Pretty cool I thought. I'd love to have this artifact in my living room! Can you imagine it as a coffee table, with glass on it of course?

I'm wanting to make a point for a friend with material from Utah. What are my best options?

I was road-tripping around the Great Lakes a bit ago, stopped to check out a few spots along the shore of Lake Superior that I've been eyeballing on geological maps for a long while...

I found some veins bearing nuggets of pure native copper. I beat some samples from the bedrock with hand-tools, and when I got home, I cleaned them up, heated them up to anneal them, and hammered one out into a pressure-flaker bit, and hafted it into a nice hard brow-tine of deer antler.

So, there you have it. A "traditional" copper pressure flaker, hewn from the bedrock by mine own hand. I'm going to save it for notching birdies on rare material. I'll probably turn the other small nuggets I got there into beads or something.

The views from the shore of Lake Superior are pretty nice

PS, small copper bits turn up like this all the time at archaeological sites in the Great Lakes region, though they are called "awls" in the archaeological literature. But I don't think they actually were mostly used for sewing.

A friend and I decided to take a roadtrip to the heart of Texas.

It always amazes us at how supportive this community is. Special shoutout to Ben Rivera for being so patient and showing us how FOG is done.

We hope to travel more and meet all you wonderful people. Happy knapping y'all!

I was able to collect a couple buckets of excellent material. Insanely fun stuff to work.

Howdy everyone! 👋

Since it's been about 2 years since my last cluster of Zilla points, I decided to make another post with some more up-to-date depictions! 😁

If any of you are curious why I made this style, it basically serves as a benchmark for material properties and a little test of my skills by utilizing style traits I really enjoy. The needle tips help me practice control, the notches help me practice m notching, the serrations look mean, and the thin nature of the point really makes me push my skills to the limit! All-in-all I really like how they look and, although tedious, it's a very rewarding style to make. 🙂‍↕️

Hopefully y'all find them cool and interesting. Don't be afraid to ask questions too!I'm always happy to answer them! Stay safe and happy knapping! 😎

- u/SmolzillaTheLizza 🦎

This is the Reinforced split stick axe that I made earlier it's very strong now

So, I just finished watching a YouTube by Cleggs Adventure. The video, titled 9000 year old mystery solved, challenges or as he puts it "solves" the origin of nutting stones. I have many in my collection and he did chanllenge me in their use.

Like many, I refer to them as nutting stones and assign their use as a holder while you begin the nut cracking. I may have to revisit that concept, but not now. Now, I'm going to challenge his "solution". He believes these are for flintknapping, a natural pocket into which the flake can be used and the reason it is round is to create a backstop for the antler to stop against after the flake as been removed.

In his defense he does mention early on that he has never flintknapped. Obviously. ...although I think he should, because he'd quickly learn the cumbersomeness of approach. What he misses is that his process is that ancient cultures were all about KISS, keep it simple. His method is not, and certainly not mobile. A knapper generates and can control direction of a flake with greater force using his leg than just downward pressure from the forearm. And his method only allows for short flakes, and didn't even consider longer flakes necessary to shoot flakes across a face... nor blades and points already hafted.

I think what bugs me more than anything else is his absolute conviction that this is 100% the answer. Not a possibility, but he's pretty damned sure about it. Anyone else seen this video?