Knapped Novaculite Knife
Posted on : 01-02-2010 | By : John | In : Stone Tools
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I made a little blade from a piece of novaculite and wasn’t sure exactly what to do with it. I ended up hafting it onto a piece of antler tine that I had laying around. I’ve made similar knives like this in the past as gifts for friends and think of them more as ornamental then functional. Normally I use 5-minute epoxy mixed with a little India ink to fasten the blade to the handle. The ink gives the epoxy a rich dark color to represent the classic pine pitch/charcoal mixture often used for primitive hafting. However, since I wasn’t giving this one away, I decided to actually use pitch for the primary hafting agent to see how it would bind. When I make these as gifts, I use masking tape to cover any part of the stone and handle that I don’t want to get stained with the ink/epoxy mixture. With this knife, I got lazy and didn’t use tape and made a mess on the upper trailing edge of the knife blade. It probably wouldn’t have been so noticeable if I wasn’t using a white stone. I wanted to make sure everything would hold together well, so as an added precaution, I used more pitch than was probably necessary resulting in a sloppy looking haft. Anyway, the novaculite blade itself is a little bulky for the thin antler handle and would have probably been better suited on the end of a spear insert or something similar. The nice thing about using the pine pitch instead of the epoxy is that if I decide I want to put the stone point onto a spear head at a later date, I can always heat up the pitch so the point loosens. I can then remove it and use it elsewhere.
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That’s a great knife! I made a black obsidian knife with a moose antler handle that could be its twin. When I showed it to a buddy of mine who hunts he said that although he doesn’t use stone knives, he likes to have antler handled knives for butchering. When wood handle gets wet (like it would cleaning a moose) it becomes slippery. Antler on the other hand becomes sticky, which makes it much easier and safer to use.
Thanks for the compliment, Tim. That means a lot to me coming from you. I’ve been following your Elfshot blog for a little while now and really admire what you do over there. I saw those hafted stone scrapers you made a few weeks back and wanted to try replicating them. Sigh! So many projects, so little time. That is a great tip too – I had no idea that antler handles have a tendency to become sticky during the butchering process.