How to Do Pressure Flaking

Video Transcript

Hi, I'm John Olsen for Expert Village. We've got our little bi-faced, pretty well finessed out. This could be used as is, as a scraper, a hand skinner, and that's probable what they would do with something large like this. When it got dull they would sharpen it and it would eventually turn into a projectile point or a really nice knife. It's kind of got a little point there, so I'm going to decide that, that's probably where I want to put my point. It's a little wide back here. I could put some more thinning flakes in it and I may do that along the way. What we're going to go into next is what's called pressure flaking. That's using an antler tine like this and a piece of leather and holding it in your hand and putting pressure on the edge and pushing off small flakes. Back and forth, not very big flakes. Kind of biting off that edge. I'm putting pressure inward. Building up pressure and then pushing down. And you can take off some pretty long flakes. If you use your knees, like some people do and like I do most of the time, you can drive those flakes in pretty far. Just basically keep nibbling the edge down. Looks like my antler tool is a little bit wore out. I have another one here; we'll see how it does. Some people use copper. Copper was mined by some of the native peoples, especially back East and used as flakers. You can clean up that edge, you can sharpen it, shape it any shape you want. Now I'm taking off really small flakes and kind of quite detailed. I can kind of prepare, little nubbins there, and make pretty hard pretty hard pushes with it. Take off a larger flake. Deer horn's a little bit wore out. You can see all these flakes coming in where I'm pushing with that antler. This is making quite a jagged edge. You can leave that and it actually works really well for your next series of pushes. And if you're making a projectile point, it really aids if it wants to go into an animal. It can do quite a bit of damage. What I think I'll do with this is make a kind of a blunt knife. I think I'll notch it back here. And that's our series of pressure flaking. Starting to develop a point here. Looking pretty good.

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