Has anyone made their own billets and/or pressure flakers before–whether copper or antler or bone?
I think I could manage making a pressure flaker (ala these instructions) but I couldn’t quite imagine making a copper capped billet.
Also, has anyone experimented with porcelain (like busted toilets and sinks) as a practice material for knapping?
I found some good resources for this kind of stuff over at PaleoPlanet and a couple of other sources:
Resources on how to knap porcelain and glass:
• Porcelain - I found this post over at the PaleoPlanet forums that shows how to knap using toilet porcelain (aka Johnstone). It also does a really good job of walking you through how to zig-zag your way around a blank using the platforms you create as you go. Plus you can see the poster’s thought process on how he intends to get flakes that work with the ridges.
• Glass - I also found this article about how to pressure flake a point out of glass from a bottle bottom.
Resources on making your own tools:
• Make your own pressure flaker.
• Make your own copper bopper billet.
• See some tools that folks on the PaleoPlanet forums use.
• A video on making copper bopper billets.
For Pressure Flakers
Antlers or bone work good, and you’ll want at least two basic types.
For Billets
I’ve seen a yew billet, bone and antler billets (moose)
I imagine you could use a cow bone or something similar
I use a rock
It seems like most modern knappers are copper-boppers.
Does anyone know any “traditional knappers”