Homemade.

Oh Ishi, how did I ever do this without your stick?

Made an ishi stick out of a dowel, a copper plumbing reducer fitting, some copper grounding wire and some epoxy. As well, fashioned a copper bopper out of another plumbing fitting, some bbs, and some hole filler (drywalling/painting).

The stick is just ridiculous. I've been able to take pressure flakes about 3x as big as the ones I'd been removing previously. As well, I watched a couple videos and have learned that my assumptions based off of what I'd read in Whittaker's book were off. Things are starting to fall into place and I'm beginning to understand a bit more.

Initially, I was under the assumption there were 3 factors of knapping: hard percussion, soft percussion, and pressure flaking. I treated these things like law, thus since soft percussion involved "soft" tools like antler I wasn't permitted to use stone. However, I watched a series of videos of a kid knapping a clovis point using a hammerstone. At that time I was also under the impression that to finish a point one had to pressure flake. Again, wrong. Still learning and I'm ok with that.

Oh, so some time after midnight Friday morning I may have ordered a 20lb box of mahogany obsidian. It should ship tomorrow, that'll be exciting. Looking forward to getting it this week and knapping all weekend, but then I remembered that there's a street festival this week that usually draws a crowd, so there'll be a bunch of passersby. We'd planned to not be home for that this year as we'd gotten blocked in for about a day and a half last year due to the parade. And as obsidian is glass, I don't want to be responsible for some kid taking a piece of glass in the face.

Along w/ tools I made a hook this weekend. Had been trying to fashion a point, but in my experimental percussion I snapped it in half, so the hook was salvage.

Anywho, work-wise I'm still watching machine. Fall is coming on. Living the dream.