Knapped Novaculite Knife

John — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:26:31 +0000

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.

Lithic Labs » pine pitch

Knapped Novaculite Knife