This year, I'm starting a series of making a variety of weapons and roughly following their evolution through history starting from basic
Metallurgy of various bladed weapons to bows and arrows and eventually working my way up to gunpowder and even a gun. Oh,
Well
We'll see what happens there a key element of this will be finally mastering one material that's been holding me back
Metals, but before I get started on metal making I want to explore the weapons materials are used before metalworking was discovered stones,
Using a specific woman to be sharper than even steel...
An obsidian blade.
Well, I was in Utah last summer, and
I made a stop in the Black Rock Desert in West Central Utah.
An area known for its volcanic activity with his last eruption around seven hundred and twenty years ago.
This area has a variety of geological formations caused by it's volcanic activity.
But the one I'm after is volcanic glass,
local geologist pointed out one location to find some.
Located seemingly in the middle of nowhere and travelling on terrain not ideally suited for my compact car.
I found the area, filled with Black Obsidian Rock.
Obsidian forms when lava high in silica cools rapidly.
Preventing the formation of crystals, a type of glass is composed of at least 70% silica.
There's often tinted dark black due to impurity. It can also form other colors depending on what impurities are present.
Pretty cool. We're gonna collect a bucket of it and use it for making sharp objects.
After loading up with some stones I brought them back home,
And met with Dr. Tostaden at the University of Minnesota.
I previously worked with Tostaden in a past video where you taught me how to nap Flint to make a basic hand axe.
This time I want to learn how to apply this skill to forming a blade out of obsidian.
These samples are pretty big, but they have lots of INCLUSIONS in them,
But I can show you how to make some cutting edges that you could actually set them into a haft,
Such you can make as long as cutting edges you want without having to make the actual stone in one piece.
Obsidian is a VERY VERY sharp Rock. It is the...
Technology is pretty much the same as as what you did last time you're here. So this is actually sharper than Flint because...
Obsidian being a volcanic glass can get to be one molecule thick at the edge.
Oh, yeah, so that's why it's it's so Powerfully sharpened and people will use it for eye surgery, but in terms of what the.. the..
Aztecs did with with their obsidian,
They're famous for taking the technology to it's utmost refineness.
They really were experts at working obsidian and they did it with a technique that made...Prismatic blades.
Those swords, they had segments of these blades and they put them in the edges on both sides of these long swords.
I'm more afraid of the concept of an obsidian hafted sword there than I am a steel sword
So from that being tools like this is kind of a refined skill, that...
They have to learn over years, then?
This takes, you know, many many years of craft specialization to be able to pull it off.
So it's probably not something I can just sit down and do right away,
No, unfortunately, and if even- even the other ways of making blades are...
MUCH trickier then, let's say the hand axe you made. One unsuccessful blow on the blade core...
OFTEN means that you've ruined the whole piece.
So what I thought to do- There are several ways of going about it.
You could actually just apply that same technology that you already learned with making a hand axe. You can actually take flakes and...
Use those as inserts much like the Aztecs did but they used long,LONG blades to do that,
We'll just use small flakes. Okay?
It's probably...The most ACHIEVABLE thing for me to do. Yeah, Yeah.
So this is actually the plastic cast of a piece from well... 240 thousand years ago in Siberia and..
On the edges they made grooves into which they set blazing but this is the general idea of making something.
Shorter like a knife rather than the big...Yeah. The big sword.
So, how do I get started? Okay, so so give you just a refresher to make a flake.
You need to hit one surface that intersects with another at an angle less than 90 degrees.
And... You need the direction of the blow to be away from..
The... The piece. You don't come... INTO this thing directly. So with a hard hammer, I might come down like THAT. Strike.
and it takes off the flake like that and then your gesture would be
Like that and you make sure you have a follow-through don't pull back at the last minute
And it doesn't have to be very hard with obsidian prepared to the Flint
There you go. All right, look at that, yeah
There you go
Okay much bigger but you can see how hitting further back made a bigger flake yeah in and of themselves
These are very useful cutting tools
Okay
That's a nice relatively
continuous edge right now
We're just looking for things that are slightly thinner and thing is the palm is just getting your accuracy down a really where you want
To hit because all these are very useful cutting edges, you know, this edge might work. Yeah
this is already fairly loops vertical so it would be relatively the same thickness as this one and
You could put them back to back with that house are those so you're getting sort of that much cutting edge
But also I think you have enough raw material here that you can just keep
Practicing and with more hand-eye coordination. I think you'll you'll get it certainly getting the right kind of breakage. Well, good luck
I think it'll be pretty cool. Thanks for doing a little refresher. And yeah, yeah, just be careful with it. Yeah, very sharp. Yeah
Thanks to dr. Toss Steven
I know both a plan for making the blade that's
Achievable with my skill level and a rough understanding of how to napa Citian to hold the blades
I still have several leftover chunks from the tree. I fell for my eyeglasses from scratch
since I'm making a Stone Age weapon
I thought I'd try to limit myself to only Stone Age tools to make a wooden portion of the blade the Flint hand axe
I made before a few granite hammer stones and of course my obsidian itself
The jagged edges of obsidian worked decently - saw the narrow portion of the board not too bad
Although it was a pretty slow process
Duct tape there we go. We're done and with some obsidian scissors snip it off
Cutting the thicker side was going to be a challenge though
So I switched up to the front and back side previously met as it's a bit more resistant to shattering than the Obsidian
After a very long and slow process to sign through it I eventually got bored of that in decide
Try splitting the board to the desired width
Using some napped chunks of Flint I tried to use them as a wedge just put the board down the green
After moderate success with that I went back to the thick end and finally got it cut enough so that I could break it
Then back to the narrowing and splitting of the wood
While sharp the Flint and obsidian was prone to breakage and was very difficult to make work I
Suspected I might have been able to get enough force. So attempted to construct a simple stone-age tool called an adze
Well that kind of helps it just still wasn't enough
With some progress but mostly frustration and moved on to napping the blades
They'd figure the woodworking would be the easier part while the napping would be the challenge both a method, dr
Kostov in recommended for me. The napping was actually pretty easy. I just needed to break off pieces
So we're thin narrow and long enough for the blade
After wasting over two days trying to carve the wood using only Stone Age tools
So they are against it you are not watching peer of Technology I decided throw in the towel and switch to some modern equipment
The difference was amazing. Well, the Flint in obsidian were razor-sharp
Sharp enough to cut my finger through the gloves. They just couldn't compare to professionally made hardened steel tools
With the wood portion on a blade finally done I now just need to attach everything for glue
I'll just need to boil some leftover hide from the pigskin. I used to make a football before
After boiling overnight it produces a very sticky animal hide glue gooey
With enough pieces laid out to fill at least one side of the blade
I just need to carve out all the slots in the wood and then glue in each blade piece
For letting that sit for a couple days the glue should hopefully be hard and ready to be used
So in the end
I've made it kind of a crude blade bit of a far cry from the more advanced blades you would see in like Mesoamerica
But without spending five years to learn that skill. It's probably pretty decent cutting edge o
Citians been a rather interesting material to work with and in pop culture has kind of a mystical view
whether it's dragon glass and Game of Thrones or
opening portals and minecraft
Beds core it's just glass and I've spent a lot of time and past projects trying to both make glass as
well as cut it and shape it into you things like lenses and
Napping is just a different way of working with the glass itself. And one of the things I was surprised to learn from dr
Costigan is that you can actually use the same technique on just regular glass
try to make a good portion of this blade using just the Stone Age tools really reveal the challenges of
Nonmetallic tools and just how big of a difference they are
So, let me see a little skeptical of how well this will actually work at cutting
It's definitely razor sharp
but I don't know how well it's actually gonna cut so I'm gonna try it out on a few different things and
Get an idea how well it works
First up to see how well it cuts paper
All right, it's not the sharpest I guess in that regard suppose are the Aztecs with their full swords
We're able to be sharp enough to cut the head off of a horse. So I think that would be the true test
I'm just knees pork chop instead. I
Got some penetration definitely cuts real deep
Paid it when you can't open bananas try the ANU obsidian blade
Mmm
Works for circumcision as well. Alright, so
Actually, we're good first thing to point out
Is that the tip fell off so my glue not the greatest Russell Moore actually pretty good
Didn't do too great at the paper test that might be more because of its jagged nature
But it really obliterated that pork chop
It would cut pretty deep and the nice jagged nature makes a really effective saw and flesh
So I'm actually pretty impressed
I did a lot better than I thought it would it's probably not gonna cut the head off of a horse
But it would definitely do some serious damage. Maybe make an artery or something
I would not want to face this a lot of times when you see obsidian
They make these really long beautiful daggers, but I worked with obsidian and realized how fragile it is
I feel like they aren't very practical like they kind of one time you wear something like this
Like you can break one of these and it easily replace it and you're good to go and keep going
So, uh terms of practicality, I think it's pretty good
so as I continue this series of making weapons and eventually get into making some metal ones such as bronze and iron and
Then I'll be able to see how the Stone Age compares to those metallic ones
But before that my next video is actually gonna be on a different metal that often served a different purpose
Gold
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