glass

[huntertrapper]

Anyone make knap glass heads for big game? i was helping dig a basement and we uncovered some old broken bottle. i was knapping some yesterday.they knap pretty good. Anyone use glass ever? i made for small game but aint sure about deer.

[Hillbilly]

I've knapped a good bit of glass, and wouldn't hesitate to use a well-made glass point as a serious hunting point. Manmade glass is pretty much identical to obsidian for all practical puposes. It's not as tough as most cherts, rhyolites, and such; but the first shot is the one that counts on an animal. If it hits a bone and breaks, the break is just exposing more razor-sharp edges.

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[huntertrapper]

wow thats nice. how to you get the roughness on it. mine is just a flat smooth piece of glass.

[Hillbilly]

You have to run flakes all the way across it (or halfway from each side) to get rid of the flat original surface. You want your points to have a lenticular cross-section. That one was made from a flat piece of fenton/carrera glass that I found at an old dump site in the woods. It's really sharp stuff, I sliced my finger to the bone on a pressure flake from that point.

[Woodland Roamer]

Yeah glass works great, is good practice and you can usaully find lots of it for free especially around old home sites or old trash dumps in the woods. That's a great looking point HB!

[Pat B]

I have knapped 1/4" plate glass from the dumpster behind a glass company(or the glass top I broke from my dining room table ). Lots of good knapping material there.
  Hillbilly, show the pis of your glass point with the wire in it.      Pat

[Hillbilly]

Pat, you mean this one?  It's knapped from that principal's-office-door-glass that has the chicken wire in it. You can also sometimes find big chunks of colored slag glass at rock shops, flea markets, and such. The Indians apparantly caught on to the knappability of glass early on. In John Lawson's A New Voyage to Carolina (a journal of his journey through the interiors of what are now NC and SC in 1700-1701 AD, ) he mentioned seeing glass arrowheads at an Indian town near present-day Durham, NC which was hundreds of miles from the nearest white settlements of the time: "I saw, among these Men, very long Arrows, headed with Pieces of Glass, which they had broken from Bottles. They had shap'd them neatly, like the Head of a Dart, but which way they did it, I can't tell." Apparantly, Ishi liked knapping arrowheads from glass, also.


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[huntertrapper]

hey thats pretty neat. ill have to practice. the glass im trying with right now is green

[david w.]

Wow those are awesome HillBilly. I am hitting the woods soon to look for glass/porcelin lots of stuff dumped there

[FlintWalker]

Hillbilly, are you the one who broke the principals glass
   I've seen lots of them made from the bottom of old soda bottles. I think it was the old returnable kind. Best I can remember, they had thick bottoms.

[Otoe Bow]

Steve.  Those are awesome.  What kind of glass is the red one?  Also, do you generally use the bottom of a glass bottle, since it's the thickest part?

Otoe

[Hillbilly]

Shannon, I plead the fifth     Otoe, that's some slag glass, I got a "boulder" of it at a rock shop a couple years ago. Yep, the bottom is the part to use. Not only is it thicker, it's also less curved. If you drop a couple 16d nails in a bottle, points down, hold your thumb over the top and shake it up and down, it'll usually pop the bottom of the bottle off almost perfectly.

[Otoe Bow]

Thanks for the nail explanation.  I read the link on the beer bottle point (after I asked the question about the bottom) but was having a hard time understanding the concept of knocking off the bottom with nails.     Makes sense now. 

Like I said, this kind of thing has opened up a whole new world for me.  We live on part of the old original family homestead of land that was opened up in the land run back in the late 1800's.  There's tons of old glass (white, green, lime green everywhere, every gully was a land fill  , ) but now I see all of that in a whole new light.  . Treasure, to trash, to treasure. 

Otoe