I Broke Open a Giant Flint River Chert Boulder… This Was Inside

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Most people look at this and see a rock.

[00:00:04]But what I see is a massive stone blade inside.

[00:00:08]Today I've got a humongous boulder of Flint River chert. It's kind of some candy-ish kind of caramel-looking color.

[00:00:17]And what I want to do is turn it into a big old blade. So I'm going to need some big old tools. So we're going to start out with a red 5-lb copper mallet and just start taking some wax off this thing.

[00:00:31]Here we go. Are you ready?

[00:00:36]All right, one more.

[00:00:39]There we go. That's more like it.

[00:00:43]Look at that right there.

[00:00:46]That is beautiful.

[00:00:51]I love this Flint River stuff. It comes from Georgia. It's naturally formed, obviously. It's not man-made.

[00:00:58]And it is just really, really slick.

[00:01:02]Love working this stuff and we're going to save this ball.

[00:01:05]Put it right down beside me here.

[00:01:08]That small isn't big enough for what we're going for today.

[00:01:13]Going to take some more flakes off and try to preserve the bottom half of this piece.

[00:01:18]We still need to get through a little bit of cortex here, which is this outer material, and see if we can get in there.

[00:01:29]All right.

[00:01:30]Looks like a lot of this wet, damp area, this was out in the out in the weather past couple days, is just cortex. So I'm going to on this side pop a flake off and maybe one here as well.

[00:01:50]Here.

[00:01:59]If we can get through the cortex, there we go.

[00:02:03]Come back here a little bit more.

[00:02:06]Ah, there we go.

[00:02:09]Another clean spall.

[00:02:11]And what we're doing is, again, we're thinning this piece down while also getting some, you know, larger spalls that we can work later. But right now, what I want is just one big biface.

[00:02:26]So, I want to remove all the cortex off that I can and be left with just some clean, nice material.

[00:02:36]Little bit off the base there.

[00:02:38]Little bit there.

[00:02:40]Little bit here.

[00:02:42]Now, you can heat treat this material to make it work a little bit nicer and, you know, just treat you a little better. Uh, but this is a raw piece and generally raw Flint River, if it's kind of the candier version, a variety, uh, generally doesn't need heat, at least for my form of napping.

[00:03:07]And this material can come in all sorts of colors and shapes.

[00:03:10]It can come in kind of a darker, more swirly, more, kind of with some white cortex pockets. But I've always fancied just the nice, clean what we call candy variety.

[00:03:25]And we're just taking big spalls off to remove the outer cortex that won't be in the complete point.

[00:03:34]And we're nearly through it in most of the areas.

[00:03:40]Okay.

[00:03:42]Now, I have to start making some some important decisions.

[00:03:51]From which side do we want to keep?

[00:03:55]I'm thinking keeping the top side here and still removing flakes off the bottom.

[00:04:00]It's some beautiful beautiful stone.

[00:04:06]All right. I don't know if we can reach this one or not.

[00:04:11]Yeah, we got it.

[00:04:15]Okay, let's try back through here. A lot of cortex, so curious to see and we did, knocked off a really nice ball there.

[00:04:26]I mean, that is just beautiful right there.

[00:04:28]Absolutely what we're looking for out of this piece.

[00:04:34]I don't know if that'll serve as a thumbnail, but uh we'll get one of these things for a thumbnail, don't worry.

[00:04:42]All right. What's next? Don't really want to strike over here as of yet, but I can strike here if I want.

[00:04:52]Maybe here, too.

[00:04:55]Yep, maybe here.

[00:04:59]Didn't quite catch it, but we did okay.

[00:05:02]Now, some of you may be wondering why I'm wearing jeans and these two having these two pads. All of that is just to protect myself. Not only are these flakes sharp at times uh and release very sharp, but yeah, I need some protection from from smacking my leg. And I get a lot of questions of, "Don't you get bruises?"

[00:05:22]Well, with enough prevention and enough smacking the leg over the years, I don't get as much bruising as I used to.

[00:05:32]Which is a good thing.

[00:05:35]All right, so we're still reducing this material down a little bit.

[00:05:39]Trying to give myself a little bit of an angle to shoot on the bottom half of this this piece.

[00:05:47]Finally got that angle. I might have hit too high.

[00:05:53]We'll see if that becomes an issue later.

[00:06:00]Isolate another little area.

[00:06:03]Come back in.

[00:06:05]And all these flakes I'll end up selling or giving away at some point, so there's any of you in the comments who are looking for flakes, just send me a message at my Gmail.

[00:06:22][email protected] So far this is doing pretty well. We've got a nice blade shape.

[00:06:30]We're looking at over 10 in right now.

[00:06:33]Right now we're at you know, 7 in wide. It won't be that wide when we complete it.

[00:06:39]I think I left this tape measure out in the the rain cuz it is not as smooth as it usually is.

[00:06:49]All right. I think what I'm going to do is downsize my boppers.

[00:06:52]So I'm going to go from a mallet to another big large copper bopper.

[00:06:59]At least that's what we call them.

[00:07:01]Copper boppers.

[00:07:03]I'd really like to strike this off.

[00:07:06]I just don't have the angle. So I've got to create an angle somehow, somewhere.

[00:07:11]The best way to do it is going to be to come from this corner here, I think.

[00:07:17]Only issue is I don't have very much room.

[00:07:21]So you got to make some room without compromising too awful much.

[00:07:29]Oh boy.

[00:07:32]Little better but not ideal.

[00:07:37]Again, we'll have to lose a little bit of length for sure.

[00:07:40]Just to clear up all of our problem areas.

[00:07:46]Okay. Now, I'm going to get my abrader out.

[00:07:50]And this takes all of the little sharp edges off that I might need off.

[00:07:57]Let's go here.

[00:08:00]There we go.

[00:08:02]Now, that was able to wrap around some of those funky areas.

[00:08:07]And finally, we're able to start a fresh and build up a little bit of confidence on this other side.

[00:08:22]All right. Still have some things we need to figure out.

[00:08:27]First thing I need to figure out is will this take a flake?

[00:08:34]I was thinking it might take one, but that's about it.

[00:08:39]Just not much to go off of. So, we're going to shoot from the back here and work our way forward and what we kind of just call a zigzag pattern.

[00:08:51]So, I'm going to zigzag the edge and try to get us up to this large thickness cuz I don't think it'll be easy to do without doing it. Unless we can catch it from this side.

[00:09:12]Which I'm about to find out if we can.

[00:09:16]All right.

[00:09:17]Let's use my mallet here.

[00:09:20]Get a big nice flake off. You call that a spall, really.

[00:09:27]Yeah, same thing there. Big big nice spall.

[00:09:33]All right. Switch back.

[00:09:38]And continue to try to move on move off some of these big flakes and get down to the blade we're after.

[00:09:47]>> [laughter] >> The blade is in here somewhere, folks.

[00:09:51]We just have to extract it.

[00:09:56]Can we do it is the question.

[00:10:00]So, again, quite a bit.

[00:10:11]>> [applause] >> You know, I was hoping that angle would be good enough.

[00:10:17]Okay, caught a little bit.

[00:10:19]Uh but, it's not going to be what one might hope. So, let's start from up here.

[00:10:28]And see if we can't get some kind of angle to shoot up into this large thickness without losing too much of our our width at the at the tip.

[00:10:56]Again, trying to do my best, but it's going to be a little difficult. I think what I'm going to have to resort to doing, and this is okay, is building up platforms to get there.

[00:11:13]So, I'm going to need to cut through a lot of this cortex like so.

[00:11:27]Go ahead and begin the striking process a little further back.

[00:11:38]Like this strike.

[00:11:43]And this strike should help.

[00:11:54]If not be the dominant strike. So, let's go with the mallet here.

[00:12:00]Ah, it bottomed out. Still got a great flake, but it did not round out like I was hoping.

[00:12:09]That doesn't mean it's a total failure, cuz we still have another platform we can utilize and maybe get a little bit OF IT OFF.

[00:12:18]>> [laughter] >> I'M ALSO GOING TO BRAID A LITTLE BIT OVER HERE.

[00:12:28]I'm really hoping this can catch some of it.

[00:12:32]Yeah, there we go. Rounded right over.

[00:12:35]That's what we're looking for.

[00:12:38]Red rover, red rover, send it right on over.

[00:12:44]Now I do that one and same thing with that one.

[00:12:50]Can we get any more out of this angle is the question. I think it's possible.

[00:12:58]Oh, yeah.

[00:13:00]There we go.

[00:13:02]Wrapped a little bit.

[00:13:05]Wrapped a little bit. We'll We'll take a little bit now.

[00:13:13]Now, will this do anything?

[00:13:17]Oh, yeah.

[00:13:18]That's that strike we're looking for there.

[00:13:23]Okay.

[00:13:26]So, now when I'm making a blade, I'm not making generally a typical blade.

[00:13:31]Not just kind of a round oval, and there you go.

[00:13:34]Trying to do something different with it.

[00:13:37]And try to make it into an actual point type or style that was utilized by the natives.

[00:13:45]So, immediately what's on my mind is a Pickwick point.

[00:13:54]A Levy point.

[00:13:56]In fact, the largest blade I've ever done was a Levy point or a Levy blade.

[00:14:02]And I think I did a seven-part series of that on this channel.

[00:14:07]It's a few years ago. At least a year or two ago.

[00:14:12]But, I also love the style of just a simple Pickwick. So, I may go Pickwick for this one.

[00:14:21]Depends on how this stone treats me.

[00:14:25]Is it going to play nice? I don't know.

[00:14:26]We'll see.

[00:14:30]But, so far we have a ton of spalls.

[00:14:37]And I'm happy that we're able to get through all of our, you know, initial issues that stones can present.

[00:14:44]Sometimes there may be something funky in the middle that you have to get around.

[00:14:51]Or it may not just not end up being a good stone, but this has turned out to be quite good.

[00:14:57]So, let's keep going here.

[00:15:02]Run our ridges.

[00:15:04]We still want to be diligent to do the right thing.

[00:15:13]Like you ought to as a Christian.

[00:15:17]And see if we can knock some of these flakes off. Okay, still still a little troubled by the thickness on this side and that needs to be addressed.

[00:15:37]And I think I'm finally able to get to a little little bit of breathing room here. Just a little bit, not a lot.

[00:15:48]Sometimes a little bit's all you need just get the process going, you know.

[00:15:56]Now I can come back on this face.

[00:16:02]And now it's starting to look like a biface. Slowly but surely we're getting it to look how it ought to look.

[00:16:15]There we go. I love those sweeping strikes across the base.

[00:16:20]And keep in mind, I'm also not trying to make the thinnest blade ever. I'm just trying to go for a particular style, so I don't want to overdo it or try to bite off more than I can chew for no reason.

[00:16:35]Just trying to have some fun.

[00:16:41]And make a nice blade. Now this should be a good strike here.

[00:16:46]Yeah.

[00:16:48]Flatten it all the way across.

[00:16:55]Okay, and now I'm starting to find out the lows and the highs, the areas that need to be struck the most.

[00:17:03]What part of this blade is the thickest?

[00:17:06]Well, right here.

[00:17:09]So we're going to go ahead and attack that.

[00:17:12]And just like that, it's gone. Now what else? Well, up here is a little bit off, but the tip itself is kind of in a dangerous territory, and I want to I want to make sure this thing doesn't just blow off to pieces. So, let's take a few strikes from the tip.

[00:17:39]Really try to minimize any kind of breakage that might happen.

[00:17:50]You may say, "Well, Jake, you're getting it You're getting it thinner. Why would that minimize breakage? Wouldn't that make it more fragile?"

[00:17:59]That's a great question.

[00:18:02]There are different ways you can look at that same, you know, idea or question.

[00:18:08]And one of them is, if you have an area that's super thin down here, but super thick up here, there is an imbalance.

[00:18:17]It's way heavier over here and way lighter and more fragile over here.

[00:18:22]Therefore, if I keep smacking at it a little area over here, it's likely that, you know, this area could come off, or if I'm supporting this big end and this light end is just wiggling around, I could get in a little bit of trouble.

[00:18:37]So, there is one portion on this piece that looks to give me a little bit of a problem, and it's that right there.

[00:18:47]This is a natural seam, and I can tell that because of the discoloration through the seam.

[00:18:55]Terminates right there on this side, but it goes in quite a ways over here.

[00:19:03]So, I'm not going to fool around with it too much yet. I need to get my thickness off first, remember?

[00:19:09]But, I do want to try to address that in time because that could be devastating if it's not addressed.

[00:19:21]Still want to do some work on the tip.

[00:19:24]Not quite satisfied with how thick it is.

[00:19:28]There we go. That helps.

[00:19:32]That helps a little bit.

[00:19:40]And that does, too.

[00:19:42]All right. That makes me feel a little bit better.

[00:19:51]So, we're thinning down the tip, but I don't want to get it too thin.

[00:19:54]I'm using my way down and make sure I'm not just overly focused on one portion of the blade and forget the rest.

[00:20:17]My dog's looking at me like, "Jake, aren't you done yet?" I'm like, "No, we just we just got started. What do you mean?"

[00:20:25]And this is where that seam is.

[00:20:31]And we're able to shoot, you know, by it.

[00:20:34]So, maybe it won't be too awful bad of a issue going forward. We'll see.

[00:20:44]It's something that right now just needs to stay in the stone. I can't do much about it.

[00:20:49]So, I won't.

[00:20:53]All right.

[00:20:54]Good flake there.

[00:20:57]Good little bit there.

[00:21:00]Just going to clean that up just a bit.

[00:21:06]Also noticing this is kind of low, so I want to tag this platform here.

[00:21:14]Yep.

[00:21:16]Ton of good flakes coming off this thing.

[00:21:23]And this is a little low in the grand scheme of things, so see if I can't draw something off of this. This is kind of an important area here.

[00:21:37]So I don't want to take it lightly.

[00:21:41]I knew I wanted to do two hits.

[00:21:46]So that was one and this will be two here.

[00:21:51]Just went ahead and held it in the hand and floated across pretty pretty smoothly.

[00:21:57]Again, not trying to keep the base super wide, so I'm going to be able to draw this in a little bit.

[00:22:05]>> [applause] >> And be able to really dial in all the flakes that I want to take or need to take.

[00:22:14]One of them is right here.

[00:22:17]As you can tell, it's kind of low.

[00:22:19]We heighten this up to make this exaggerated.

[00:22:26]So that we can just I call that a pancake flake. Well, I put it on the pad and I pancake it in between.

[00:22:33]I guess you could call it a smash burger. You can call it whatever you want to, but I do love those particular flakes and the way that they feel when they come off because a large part of flint knapping is just the fun of and the thrill of getting a nice flake off.

[00:22:55]And doing that method, you can actually feel it really really well.

[00:23:02]It's not something I utilize on every flake I do, but there are some where I really want to smack them across the the length of the piece where it can be really helpful.

[00:23:24]Okay.

[00:23:28]That's right there near that seam, so again need to be very careful.

[00:23:35]Really not much I can do, but looks like we're able to still float by it.

[00:23:40]Okay, even though it's it's going to be an issue in times when the time comes.

[00:23:51]When the time comes.

[00:24:03]I feel like that quote is in every movie I've ever seen. When the time comes.

[00:24:08]When the time comes.

[00:24:12]All right.

[00:24:16]Thin down this side here.

[00:24:26]Pretty good.

[00:24:31]You'll notice the direction. I didn't just do straight across here, but slightly up.

[00:24:37]Upwards. And that's because when I get up to here, notice this big kind of shadowy area here and here.

[00:24:44]I need to shoot a flake up here. So, I'm already setting myself up for a good flake up here.

[00:24:50]So, trying to think a little bit ahead.

[00:25:01]>> And now the time comes where I got to try to draw off a good flake here and this can be tricky.

[00:25:19]And really will be tricky now that I see it.

[00:25:30]Yeah, it looks like I'm going to need to I'm going to need to do another flake straight back.

[00:25:43]That flake just cleared out that area here to really highlight and accentuate that area and I'm also trying to get that platform down a little bit.

[00:26:02]Also need to give it some room to go, so >> [applause] >> This is not a great platform. It's too thick, but we got to do it. Here we go.

[00:26:17]All right.

[00:26:19]Went all the way to there.

[00:26:21]Pretty pleased. Pretty pleased. I think we can shoot across now without too much difficulty and and be okay.

[00:26:31]I want to see if I can overshoot here >> [applause] >> because it'd be easier to overshoot if I can than to try to you know, gamble on the other side, so uh No, but we're able to get up there to it, which is better than nothing.

[00:27:08]So, we got to turn the corner.

[00:27:11]And there we go.

[00:27:25]I'll have to come back and highlight that cuz there's a certainly a low spot here.

[00:27:30]But, I don't want to do anything too preemptively.

[00:27:40]Yeah, definitely needed to get on top there, and we did.

[00:27:44]Yep.

[00:27:46]Yes.

[00:27:49]There we go.

[00:27:55]And this allows for maybe something decent here.

[00:28:04]Yeah.

[00:28:09]We don't have much of a window to work, but we'll take what we get.

[00:28:15]And we'll use it to our advantage. You ready?

[00:28:20]There we go.

[00:28:23]Break a little more.

[00:28:27]Look at that.

[00:28:29]That is what we're after.

[00:28:32]Come on now.

[00:28:38]>> [laughter] >> Three for three here.

[00:28:45]Three for three.

[00:28:47]Four for four.

[00:28:49]>> [laughter] >> Four for four.

[00:29:04]Five for five.

[00:29:09]It's not exactly a replica of those other flakes I just took, but Oh, yeah. That was a monster.

[00:29:27]That was a monster.

[00:29:30]That was awesome.

[00:29:32]Again, all these flakes can be used for arrowheads to come, and I'm going to save this platform right here.

[00:29:43]Draw straight across.

[00:29:46]Uh for next time.

[00:29:51]All right.

[00:29:53]Got a great platform here to strike.

[00:29:56]And again, we can continue, but I wouldn't want to continue without taking that strike.

[00:30:02]Which honestly needs to be set up for the other row.

[00:30:06]But >> [laughter] >> I can't without finishing this off. So, this could be really bad here.

[00:30:16]Or it could be great.

[00:30:18]Turns out it was great.

[00:30:21]Uh >> [laughter] >> I shouldn't, so I won't.

[00:30:29]I was going to take a big flake there, and I think it's best that I hold off at least for now.

[00:30:39]Cuz I I to finish up our row here.

[00:30:48]And here we go.

[00:30:52]Six for six.

[00:30:57]And I'm saving some good platforms for later.

[00:31:02]So that makes it all the more better.

[00:31:11]I don't need much here.

[00:31:15]And I got exactly what I was looking for.

[00:31:18]Guys, this is going to be an awesome blade. You guys remember how it looked like at the beginning?

[00:31:23]And here we are.

[00:31:26]It's going to take uh a little while longer to finish it. But good news is I'm going to do it with you guys. We're still sitting around 10 in or so.

[00:31:35]Of course there are a couple problem areas. One is this seam here we got to address later on.

[00:31:40]Um and a little bit of cortex at the base we got to get rid of. So it'll probably be a 9-in blade.

[00:31:45]Nonetheless, pretty doggone cool.

[00:31:48]I have so many spalls {slash} flakes down here it's not funny.

[00:31:54]If anybody's curious or interested in them, uh just shoot me a message. I'm sure I could fill a medium flat rate box of them.

[00:32:00]But uh anyways, thank you guys for tuning in. And until next time, there might be a part two.

[00:32:07]So, stay tuned. See you on the next video. Have a great day.