[steven gordon]

I went as far as getting a couple of nodules of English flint I haven't used. I also got the book, Flint Knapping, which told me all I needed to know about flint knapping. It seems that flint knapping is a lot like a lot of other things: a small amount of experience will do a lot and a lot of experiece is needed for mastery.

I tried knapping the english flint and it knaps well and easily.

So after I thought about the English Flint, I thought about Obsidian, and then I thought about bottle glass.

Actually, Pyrex works pretty darn well; it's easy to pressure flake and it's pretty predictable when you shape it. The problem is that when you take an itty bitty piece out of your wife's baking dish she gets pissed off.

There are a lot of materials that will spall, that is, make chips when pressed, leaving a sharp edge. The easier they spall, the easier they are to work, but the less durable they are when striking against a frizzen.

So then I started to think about chert, which is coarser, then I naturally thought about quartz (can you tell I took some geology courses?) then I thought about asking some rock hound friends of mine to cut me some pieces of quartz, but I didn't get that far.

I have a friend who's a ceramics engineer, and before I could start whacking away at the various ceramics in my house, we figured out the proper material could be made pretty cheaply.

Before I could get it on the market, Elk K enterprises came out with their DuraFlint. It's a good product and it sparks well.

But it's not flint. And, after all, if we were after innovation, we wouldn't be on the web site.

Which brings us back to your question.

Get a book on flint knapping, try Amazon.com. When you practice, start with stuff that's easy to come by and won't hurt to throw away, like glass. It'll take you a while to get the right shape of quartz, and it'll be miserable to pressure flake, but it'll probably last quite a while.

And a deer antler tine will work OK for pressure flaking without the copper tubing. Can I recommend holding the set up in a piece of deerskin against your palm?

But the copper works better.