# Flint Knapping: An OLD school survival skill....



## DM1791 (Oct 6, 2014)

When we think of preparing for hard times, there are a few categories that those preps fall into. You can prepare for the short-term disaster like a tornado or a "mild" snow-in with power outage where you may have to provide for yourself and your family for a few days of heat, water, and food. In this kind of situation, you expect utilities and services to be restored relatively quickly with minimal disruption to your life overall. Then there is the medium-scale prepping for larger incidents like hurricanes, earthquakes, or contained rioting and civil unrest. In this situation, you plan to make it for at least 7-10 days, possibly a month without outside assistance. You need good stocks of food, water, medicine, and some form of power, even as simple as a propane camp stove. It's a good idea to have protection of some form (guns, knives, dogs, etc.) so that when social order eventually breaks down, as it inevitably will in a weeks long crisis, you are ready to keep the chaos at bay. But, even in this extreme situation, you expect utilities, services, and order to be restored eventually.

These first two are the levels of preparedness most people think of when they think disaster readiness. They are the most common and most well-publicized disasters and they are most likely what we will face in our lifetimes, if we are confronted with a "survival" situation. When I was a freshman in high school, Hurricane Fran came through our small farming community and devastated the place. We had no power for a little more than a week and a half, and without the Depression Era mindset of my grandparents and parents, we would have been in some serious trouble. Being prepared for this kind of catastrophe is vitally important to our families' safety and survival.

That brings us to the third, and most extreme level of catastrophe and preparedness...the complete collapse scenario (SHTF or EOTWAWKI scenario). In this situation, all bets are off. The collapse is complete, and normal life as we know it today simply isn't coming back, or if it is you are talking years if not generations of time between the event and the reconstruction. To be truly prepared for this kind of situation, you have to be ready not just to survive, but to live on your own ingenuity and fortitude for a very extended period of time with little to no outside help whatsoever.

In this most extreme case, you have to look at survival in a decades long view. On a time scale that large, some rather unconventional skills may become necessary. After a long enough time horizon, simple things that we take for granted today like the wide availability of worked and machined metal (screws, nails, hinges, etc.) will become the utmost luxury available only to a very select few. In such an extreme situation, skills and technology so old and outdated that they have become the curiosity of academia may become the lifeline that keeps people fed and safe.

Enter the skill of flint knapping.

Put very simply, flint knapping is the art of shaping stone tools from rough rock. This is a skill that goes back literally ten thousand years and more to the very dawn of the first recognizable human civilizations. And, sad as it is to say, some of the absolute earliest remains of humans that we have found to date have the very clear and unmistakable signs that such stone tools were used often in a violent manner by one person against another...and they are effective.

Flint knapping is a very technical skill that takes time and practice to acquire proficiency. However, it is well within the grasp of most people, given enough dedication and motivation to learn. I have been hammering rocks together for a little more than four years now, and can make passable projectile points and small blades that are sharp enough to require stitches for the occasional accident (just ask my wife). I hope in the next few years to craft some arrows tipped with stone points I have made and test them in the field to see how adequate they are for procuring game, but that is down the road.

There are a wide ranging variety of tools and skills that go into the art of flint knapping. The paleo and Neolithic peoples used stone, antler, bone, wood, ivory, and copper (debated) in the production of their tools, projectiles, and blades. The material these objects are crafted from include chert, quartz, flint (a type of chert), basalt, obsidian, jasper, etc. Any finely grained micro-crystalline rock will work. Also, modern production glass serves quite well (so long as it isn't safety-glass, shatter proof glass, plexiglass, etc.... the regular tempered kind). You can even fashion razor sharp points and blades from porcelain and ceramics such as fine china dinner plates and toilets.

If this topic attracts interest, as I hope it will, I plan to post a step by step picture diary showing the shaping of several points and blades from various materials. I will attempt to post a few pictures of some of the stone implements I have fashioned so far for reference. The first picture is a preform I made from a piece of obsidian (volcanic glass widely available on the west coast) and the second picture is of the projectile point I was able to chip out of the preform. The sides don't look like it, but they are beyond razor sharp. Obsidian tools dating to 3-4,000 years old have been found with cutting edges still sharper than a surgeon's scalpel, so if you decide to work this stuff, BE CAREFUL!!! Safety glasses and leather gloves are a must!


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## crabapple (Jan 1, 2012)

There are a few threads on this,even a U-TUBE on making the arrow heads/knives out of coke bottles.
I have never completed one, but think I could if need be.
I am for a stainless steel knife first, then carbon steel, but all alone with no tools one could use this skill in a pinch.


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## DM1791 (Oct 6, 2014)

crabapple said:


> There are a few threads on this,even a U-TUBE on making the arrow heads/knives out of coke bottles.
> I have never completed one, but think I could if need be.
> I am for a stainless steel knife first, then carbon steel, but all alone with no tools one could use this skill in a pinch.


 I agree about preferring steel to stone. There's a reason that stone tools and implements faded quickly from the Native American's tool kit once European iron and steel were introduced. As long as steel is readily available, that is the obvious choice for tools and what not.....

However, more than knife applications, I was thinking about the usefulness in hunting. In a long enough time horizon during a true breakdown of society, it will be vitally important to ration the use of ammunition and firearms. If a real-world breakdown of the entire financial system (globally) were to happen, for instance, then what would happen to our ammo supply? Even if you have 10,000 rounds per firearm, how long will that realistically last? Keep in mind that for new and inexperienced shooters you'll probably need at least a few hundred, if not a thousand rounds just for training.

Ammunition for firearms in that kind of scenario would be too valuable as defense to be used in hunting, even with several thousand rounds of ammo in the storage bins. That being the case, a method of acquiring game that doesn't involve using ammo (or powder if you're a muzzle-loading fan) would be a very useful skill to have.

Also, knapping is an incredibly addictive hobby once you get into it. It's just plane fun to watch a lump of rock turn into something beautiful and dangerous.


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## hiwall (Jun 15, 2012)

While this is a skill and most any skill has merit I feel this is down the list a ways. in an EOTWAWKI situation there will still be scrap metal of all kinds available to scavengers (like me) for a very long time that I can make into at least as good of arrow points or simple knives. Bow making and arrow making are good skills but they can be fairly easily mastered when forced to.


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## crabapple (Jan 1, 2012)

hiwall said:


> While this is a skill and most any skill has merit I feel this is down the list a ways. in an EOTWAWKI situation there will still be scrap metal of all kinds available to scavengers (like me) for a very long time that I can make into at least as good of arrow points or simple knives. Bow making and arrow making are good skills but they can be fairly easily mastered when forced to.


I am all for this skill, to teaching it to youngster so when & if the metal is in short supply.
I am over 50 & have scrap metal, leaf springs for making edged weapon/tools.
I collect hand tools also, but need to add a good bow & 50 or so arrows to the mix.
As for arrow heads, the single heads can be made from 16 gauge/ 1/16 inch stainless steel sheet metal & never rust.
The shafts could be made from aluminum tubing, which you can cut now & store until needed, they would not rust.
If you are going to make them from river cane, bamboo, or wood, you will need the plants at you BOL.
Bamboo, yaupon holly,swamp dogwood, Sour wood (also good for honey), Sparkle berry are a few trees here in the South that have been used for shafts.
They are used because of their hardness,stiffness, straight shoots with no branches.

http://www.choctawschool.com/home-side-menu/iti-fabvssa/making-a-choctaw-war-arrow.aspx


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