Another speculative question

[Eric Krewson]

I have a cookie can with about 30# of broken flint points in it from my artifact hunting days. I will see what I can repurpose to use in my fowler.

I bought some large white flints from Neolithics but they are too thick and have a long, narrow pointed end that breaks easily. I will look for an artifact replacement.

Now, before anyone gets their panties in a wad about me using a possibly ancient object and ruining the historic value of it; My son and I spent hours sifting through my collection of stuff(some with mud still on them) and removing anything with collector value. The leftovers are broken pieces with no definite association with any particular area or site. All were picked up at random close to 50 years ago.

 

[M. De Land]

I don't do a lot of knapping but when I do it's outside or I'm wearing a dust mask.
I think the worst is when grinding the humps off. I always wear a mask for that part.

 

[Loyalist Dave]

Yes, I , too, would like to see where you got your information. I am quite aware of the lung diseases resultant from stone cutting, grinding and polishing since these actions create very fine respirable dust. But, flint flaking and knapping do not produce these fine respirable particles. The fine chips and flakes produced in knapping of flints are much to large to be inhaled.

Well part of the problem is that these fellows were in doors, 6 days a week, probably for 10-12 hours doing nothing but knapping, while their ancient counterparts who were making stone tools had much less exposure.

On the other hand you have them even in their time associating the disease to the occupation...Knapper's Rot.

What we don't know is how much of other parts of their lives also Impacted their lungs toward Silicosis. What I'm getting at is the knapping job may have simply accelerated the disease, and perhaps many of of the non-knappers in the same community would have died at around 60 of Silicosis from other exposures, but heart disease claimed them in their late 50's. Just as today with the longer life spans we see an uptick in the percentage of the population effected by Alzheimer's...we don't know if the previous decades would've been the same but they died younger, before onset.

LD

 

[Eric Krewson]

Here you go, a repurposed broken projectile point turned into a gun flint, it took about a minute to reform and sparks like crazy.

According to an elderly now deceased friend, arrowheads were so common in his youth nobody bothered to pick them up and save them. He said they used to skip them on the river because they had so many of them.

These would be easy to find by early frontiersman as well and repurpose into gun flints.

 

[Gene L]

If it works, it works. When I was a kid, I lived near a mound and projectile points (most of them were actually atlatl points) were around a lot. They were mostly quartzite and I'm not sure how well they'd cause a spark.

 

[Artificer]

I hope I am describing this so folks can picture it.

In Colonial Frontier Guns, by T.M. Hamilton, it shows excavated Native American made gun flints and they often have points on both the front and back where each edge is sort of rounded down on the top and bottom towards the sharp edges. This is similar to how the sides of some arrow heads are sort of rounded down to the sharp edges.

Gus

 

[M. De Land]

I don't as of yet know what the difference is between the way the French and English spauled blades off a core to make gun flints but the ridge back on today's flints are the result of the platform set up on the core from which to strike off the blade and then gun flint.The gun flints will be orientated at 90 degrees to blade profile before they are struck off over an anvil to final form.
This naturally makes a sharp edge on either side of the ridge more or less going down the middle back of the blade.
I make most of my flints from flakes not core blades which require edge shaping but tend to be much flatter than a core struck gun flint.

 

[Eric Krewson]

Another thing; I made a gunflint shaping hammer out of an old file as well as a shaping bench just like the Brandon gunflint makers have out of another broken file driven into a piece of a log. It is easy for me to shape a broken arrowhead into a gunflint with this setup.

 

[M. De Land]

Yeah, I need to try that set up as I've seen it before in one of the how to video's.
It's not really needed when one makes them from flakes left over from arrow head knapping because they are already quite small and easily shaped on your leg, knapping pad.