Knapping in the Man Cave

     Home from the trip to Sunriver, I was eager to start working with the obsidian. First up, however, was to clean up Anne's CRV. It had treated us well while it slowly found the way to Little Glass Butte. To climb further to the top of Main Glass Butte would have required 4-wheel drive and a higher ground clearance. We'll need to save that for another day.

      Once I was cleared by the CRV boss, I hid myself in the man cave, fashioned a couple of knapping tools, donned my Bob apron and selected my first obsidian victim from one of the two bags we had filled.  

      The first thing that needs to be done with the stone is to attempt to create a usable flake. This normally means holding the stone firmly in one hand and whacking it severely with a hammer stone with the other hand. If you have selected a good spot on the stone's surface, then a piece(s) of obsidian will fall away. One needs to whack the stone at an angle which is away from the stone's center of mass. The angle is ~ 75 degrees. 

     Well, whack away I did. If I weren't such a newbie at this craft, I would suggest that it appeared many of the obsidian stones we had found at Glass Butte were defective, because all they did was crumble when struck. Of course, I was striking the piece incorrectly.  Alas, I finally managed to break off a usable flake.
      This first step is known as percussion knapping. This is often done with a river rock that is easily gripped and has a distinct striking edge. Using a percussion tool is often the easiest way to rid a flake of regions of excess stone.
     The next step is called pressure knapping. 
The lathe was handy to turn a couple of grips to hold small lengths of 3/16" brass rod. Metals such as copper, of which brass is primarily made, work well in holding firm on the edge of a flake of obsidian.
     When down and outward pressure is applied on the edge of the flake with the flaking tool, one wants to hear a snapping sound as the tip of the tool breaks past the edge. How the tool is positioned on the edge, at what angle of attack it is held, and how much thrusting pressure is applied all combine to determine the size and shape of the small flake which breaks away. A pointed antler has historically been favored as a pressure knapping tool.
      I used the drill press to center a hole in the end of the new handle. I then tapped a 2" length of brass rod into the end. I roughened the end of the rod with my hammer stone. The hammer stone can also be used to mildly abrade the edge of the obsidian stone you are flaking. This is important to repeatedly do, as flake removal leaves behind a shiny and slippery surface.       
     The surface one is working on is know as the platform. The platform must have an edge which is either flat, or slightly raised. If not, the flaking tool will just slide off. 
     I quickly learned that creating something like an arrowhead is not a very efficient use of an obsidian stone. It is my hope that my efficiency will improve rapidly so I do not cobble all of the stones into gravel and dust. 
     Within a few hours, and a couple of days, I had created a few arrowheads. A handful of them turned out to be very nicely proportioned; length, width, and thickness wise. I also created a significant pile of very sharp pieces of volcanic glass.     
                                               
                    
     As an archer, I was eager to try a few of the heads to see it they could withstand impact with my hay bale target butt. Over time many of my arrows receive some form of damage. I selected three which needed new points. 
     After carefully notching the tips, I used a waxed nylon string to bind the heads to the shafts. In the wild, one would use sinew to tie on the head and follow up with a pitch to take any small amount of wiggle out of the arrowhead. I chose to use a few drops of CA glue, aka, superglue. Those heads were locked in tight.
    It has been said that a fine flake of obsidian will create a cutting edge that is one molecule thick. This is compared to surgical steel which can be sharpened to within four molecules of thickness. The flaked edge of an arrowhead is much wider than one molecule, but it is still extremely sharp. I was impressed with the arrows' balance and how well they flew. All shot true and survived to be used again, and again, I hope.

A week’s get-away to Sunriver

Anne and I schedule at least six weeks each summer and autumn for stays at our Sunriver condo. We rarely fulfill our total visits and we end up donating some of the weeks to family and friends.

            Anne booked a couple of weeks near my birthday at the end of August. We came over on Saturday the 29^th and will stay through Friday the 4^th of September. Chris, Jennifer and the boys will come to Sunriver on the 4^th to spend the weekend with Jennifer’s brother, Drew, and his wife and daughters. Drew’s clan is driving down from Seattle for the visit.

            This has been a busy summer and Anne and I both looked forward to the get-away. We arrived Saturday afternoon to find that our condo was occupied. RCI, the organization which books all of the visits, had erred and lodged a party in our unit when we were supposed to be there. We were housed in another condo until Monday when our unit would be vacant and cleaned for us. This worked ok.

            Anne quickly setup the table with here quilting project. She looks forward to these visits because she can get uninterrupted time for her crafts. I finished a historical book on the development of the periodic table. The title is The Disappearing Spoon. The subject sounds obtuse, but it is a very clever account of the discoveries of the natural elements and the subsequent creation of man-made elements.  The discovery methods are fascinating, and some of the original uses of the elements were mind boggling. My next read may be even stranger.

The grandsons presented me with a copy of The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets for my birthday. The Simpsons is one of the most successful television shows in history. The weekly episodes expose viewers to social philosophy, moral and ethical positions, religious and spiritual viewpoints, and science and mathematics. President George H. W. Bush claimed to have exposed the real message behind The Simpsons. He believed that the series was designed to display the worst possible social values. At the 1992 Republican National Convention he said, “We are going to keep on trying to strengthen the American family a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons.”

Authors of the scripts for the series are dominated by writers with strong academic backgrounds in mathematics and computer science. There are Harvard and Princeton PhDs in the group. All are dedicated to including math and science into most of the weekly programs. The evidence of their work is often very sub-rosa and sometimes involves complex mathematical concepts. Written by Simon Singh, a PhD Particle Physicist and a successful science author, the book presents an easy read about The Simpsons and how weekly topics are developed.

Central Oregon is known as a high desert region. There is much history here about the volcanic foundations of the Cascade Mountain Range. My son, Chris, and down-under friend, John Mignone, have

interested me in spending some pass time knapping. This is how one creates things like arrowheads out of a piece of obsidian. With time available, I decided while in Sunriver I would stock up on obsidian to take home. A good place to start is at Newberry National Volcanic Monument which is located ~15miles east of Lapine. From Sunriver that would be about a 30mile trip.

Located with Paulina Lake the Newberry lava fields may be a convenient place to pick up some obsidian. Monday I set out for a drive to find some stones. The short, easy walk from Crater Campground to the middle crater turned out to be an up-hill hike through the woods.  I had been told that the little crater held obsidian and that nabbing a few pieces wouldn’t be noticed by the Feds. My hike began a 6,331 feet. I ended my trek at ~7,000’ when I reached a near summit

between Paulina and East lakes. The views were spectacular under a crisp blue sky. Now and again I would hear the scampering of a ground squirrel or the distant thumping of a woodpecker. If it weren’t for those noises, there would be none. I was alone and I was nowhere near obsidian.

Climbing the trail found me stopping every few hundred yards to slow my heart rate and to catch some deep breaths. I was able to

take in how the forest floor had been piled like a boneyard with fallen pine. There was sparse under brush, but there was lots of fodder for mankind, or Nature to build a raging campfire. At a few places along the trail the slope was steep enough that its builders, probably the CCC, had felt it necessary to lay in sections of railroad sleepers to build steps.

The return hike uses less energy, as it is downhill. From a physics viewpoint, the roundtrip should net zero work. However,

climbing down a narrow, dusty trail requires more careful thought be given to each foot placement than does the climb up. In either direction one cannot just stroll along and gaze at distant scenery. The focus is on the trail. I broke a limb from a fallen pine and fashioned a walking stick. The narrow end of the stick had a large curve to it. I found that striking it out in front every couple of steps produced a springing response when I re-lifted it. Oddly, I found using the stick entertaining on my way back.

I heard a nearby woodpecker pecking for grub. I used the stick to tap the bark of a tree and I tried to emulate the pulses the woodpecker had made. When I stopped, the woodpecker responded. We communicated back and forth for a couple of minutes. I don’t know if the bird was successful at food gathering, but I was getting hungry.

Anne always seems to find gifts which bring entertainment and functionality. For my birthday she bought me a Fitbit. The Fitbit is a device which is worn like a watch. The Fitbit keeps track of your daily activity, caloric use and intake, as well as monitoring how well you have slept. It can also be programmed to eight different alarms which cause the device to vibrate when it is time. I wore the Fitbit for my Paulina Lake trip. When I synced it with my IPhone that night, it showed that I had taken 7,828 steps during the day. I felt it that evening when I finally got to bed.

Exiting the Newberry Monument I stopped at the visitors’ center. I inquired of the ranger on duty where I might find obsidian. She informed me right off that it was prohibitive to remove anything from within the park boundaries. She went on to recommend the Lapine Saturday Market if I wanted finished obsidian or Glass Butte if I wanted to scrounge for stones on the ground.

Glass Butte is approximately 70 miles east of Bend, on Hwy 20.

The butte is located on fenced grazing land owned by the BLM. BLM allows incursions so long as gates are reclosed and outback conservative protocols are followed. The agency permits the removal of stones from the land.

Tuesday morning Anne and I set out to find Glass Butte. When we had gone 70 miles, I turned on Google map on the IPhone and it said we had 20 more miles to drive. The phone’s GPS brought us right to the gated entrance which led to Glass Butte. I opened the wire gate, drove through, and reclosed the gate. For the next couple of miles we were going to be on unimproved dirt roads.

The going along the beaten, water troughed track was slow and cautious. Dirt had been washed away from large stones on the path. Avoiding road hazards meant steering close to the paint scratching sagebrush crowding the edge of the trail. This was not ideal environs for Anne’s Honda CRV.

As we climbed higher we began to notice sparkling glasslike shards lying in and alongside the trail. The glints were coming from pieces of obsidian. We were on the right road.

At mile 2, the GPS told us to turn right in 800 feet. When we made the turn, we were looking up a very rutted stretch of road. We were not going to try to get the CRV through there. We had just passed a siding which offered a pullover and a place to noodle

around for surface obsidian. I backed out of the turn and returned to the siding.

Obsidian lay everywhere. Interspersed with patches of wild grass were large areas strewn with fist sized and smaller pieces of shiny black obsidian. We had found ourselves in knappers’ heaven.

Each of us had a fabric grocery bag and we filled them up. I scouted for large pieces as well as for smaller stones which could be quickly knapped into a shape. Some stones had irregular surfaces and I wondered if, when broken, they would be irregular inside, too. Being newbie collectors, we did not know what surface characteristics to avoid, and which to select. I suspect we ended up with a whole lot of both.

Each March a Bend area outdoor group hosts a Glass Butte Camp-in. You take your chances with the early spring

weather.Members, and strangers, meet to enjoy what Glass Butte has to offer: hiking, knapping, visiting, and archery. The list of activities is long. The siding we parked at may be a camping site for these March outings. A large stacked stone wall had been erected around two stone campfires. The walls buffered the prevailing wind direction and one of the stone fire pits was positioned so it could provide warmth for wall protected ground sleepers. A tree at this site had a 3’x3’ wood table attached to it. The table had a small pile of obsidian on it. Perhaps used for both standup knapping and for meal service, the table would be a valuable asset to the campers.

New ruts and obstructions were discovered on the two mile drive back down the hill side. When we exited I took a snapshot of an easily recognized roadside landmark on the other side of the road. Anne drove us into Bend where we located a Wendy’s and sat down for a well-deserved late lunch.