It was a sunny day so my wife and I went to the beach. We went to a quiet beach with little more than a car park, a loo and a kiosk. It was a small, stony bay set into chalk cliffs. Great place to practice knapping!
I settled down with a leather glove on one hand and a towel over my leg and set to trying to remember the skills Will Lord had taught me at the bushmoot this summer. I started out with working out how to break a large flint cobble. Actually it wasn't too difficult. I used 3 flints to do it - one acted as the anvil, one as the hammer and one was the target. A couple of goes and I had split this stone about 9" across. I then used smaller rounded flints as hammer stones to knock flakes off the pieces. After a few minutes I decided that the rounded flint cobbles on the beach aren't great stones to knap as the surfaces are pretty fractured and fissured with a long life of knocking about in all weathers on the beach.
So, I hunted out a raw flint that had come out of the chalk cliff much more recently. This worked much better.
I didn't make anything recognisable but had a great time knocking hell out of my rock. I'd have done more but I decided my hammer stones being also flint were not entirely safe as they could fracture during use and endanger my main hand. So I called it a day to locate some sedimentary rocks (harder than chalk) another time.
I had a couple of interested spectators from S. Africa who had never seen chalk or flint or knapping before. So we talked about the properties and the formation of flint and the basics of knapping.
I finished off doing a hunt for iron nodules in the chalk boulders off the chalk face and came away with a few. I thought I might get some sparks off them with some flint flakes, but they seemed far too soft.
And my wife? She was more than happy to have a quiet read in the sun.
I settled down with a leather glove on one hand and a towel over my leg and set to trying to remember the skills Will Lord had taught me at the bushmoot this summer. I started out with working out how to break a large flint cobble. Actually it wasn't too difficult. I used 3 flints to do it - one acted as the anvil, one as the hammer and one was the target. A couple of goes and I had split this stone about 9" across. I then used smaller rounded flints as hammer stones to knock flakes off the pieces. After a few minutes I decided that the rounded flint cobbles on the beach aren't great stones to knap as the surfaces are pretty fractured and fissured with a long life of knocking about in all weathers on the beach.
So, I hunted out a raw flint that had come out of the chalk cliff much more recently. This worked much better.
I didn't make anything recognisable but had a great time knocking hell out of my rock. I'd have done more but I decided my hammer stones being also flint were not entirely safe as they could fracture during use and endanger my main hand. So I called it a day to locate some sedimentary rocks (harder than chalk) another time.
I had a couple of interested spectators from S. Africa who had never seen chalk or flint or knapping before. So we talked about the properties and the formation of flint and the basics of knapping.
I finished off doing a hunt for iron nodules in the chalk boulders off the chalk face and came away with a few. I thought I might get some sparks off them with some flint flakes, but they seemed far too soft.
And my wife? She was more than happy to have a quiet read in the sun.
and good job on the flint knapping at that, i always somehow manage to break the flint clean in half and dont find another bit for about a month : (
