Just made this to kill time and get my mind off my problems. I think it would break if you tried to slay an dragon with it, unless it was a really small one. The blade is about 23 inches long by 2 inches wide. Black table top glass. It took 2.5 hours to chip, with a rice pudding brake in there somewhere.
The archery shoot went well, the weather was great, nice and sunny. Knappers came from all over the state. David, Gary and I drove up early this morning from Bakersfield. David drove us in his Chevy Suburban. Just before we got there we stopped and pigged out at Home Ton Buffet. On the way down we saw a heard of tule elk and then down the road two antelope were fighting with their horns.
Once there we met up with old friends Alton Safford, Joe Dabill, Barney DeSimone, Ralph Lawless, Patric Aims and Merkle with his new beautiful baby daughter, his Finegold knap-in is the 3rd weekend in May near Fresno, CA. John and George were there, also from the Bakersfield knapping club, but wecould not find George.
It was a great day of flintknapping in the beautiful rolling hills of Chamberlin Ranch in Los Olivos, California. Gary Picket knapped an obsidian heart for a young lady, Barney brought in some nice porcelinite and obsidian to chip, Ralph Lawless knapped some nice bifaces out of some local cherts and some thick blue glass and had a great display. He gives demos and knapping lessons ravenstone5@yahoo.com. Joe Dabill knapped some Ishi points out of some green fiber optic material I gave him. Joe specializes in artifact reproductions and instruction in primitive technology(805)927-0254 see Joe's work @ www.campoceanpines.org
I knapped this shark here that is eating Gary's face.
Here is Ray Harwood (AKA me) with my buffalo knives, last years bison butchering.
There were hundreds of booths and thousandS of visitors over the course of the week end. Many antique dealers, gem and mineral dealers, fossil tarders and more. Lots of food booths. Eight bucks to get in...ouch. But it was fun. Kettle corn was good! Live music all day was amazingly good. Really good jazz band.
FLINTKNAPPING PHOTOS FROM THE THE FAIR
I ate my lunch at the Los Hermonos Mexican food booth. a large burrito. Here it is.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// THE TEXAS MASTER; In the states of Texas was a long lean bloke, it wasn't Johnny Smoke, it was paleo flintknapping pioneer, J.B. Sollberger. I was aquatinted with Mr. Sollberger and know that he was a true master flintknapper and influence to hundreds. Though they were contemporary, Carabtree and Texan, J.B. Sollberger spurred on two separate schools of thought. Crabtree the obsidian school and Sollberger the Texas flint school. Though both are flintknapping, the methodology is very different. In the realm of thought and mental visualization, deep in the mind is the perfect visualization or pure idea, the mental template. For most craftsmen by the time this idea becomes a piece of work it has lost a bit of perfection. On rare occasion it is manifested in a piece of art work, this was the case with the magnificent flintwork of J.B. Sollberger, of Dallas, Texas. Sollberger was a true flintknapping pioneer and a legend in his time. Not only was Sollberger a master knapper, he was truly a gentleman and humble as well. He was very analytical with his theoretical papers and articles being the best in the field. His literary works were of the highest quality where he published in many journals including American Antiquity, Lithic Technology, Flintknappers' Exchange, Flintknapping Digest, and The Emic Perspective. J.B. Sollberger started flintknapping when he was middle aged, some time around 1970. He always had a curiosity about knapping but didn't get the "lithic erg" until he observed a scrapper making demonstration at the 1970 Dallas Archaeological Society meetings. Ironically Don Crabtree came to Dallas to the meetings but J.B. Sollberger had to work so he missed the opportunity to meet Crabtree. The next week he tried to make up for it buy going on his first flint hunt and ordering Crabtrees book. Upon reading this, Sollberger got a basic tool kit together and began experimenting. Sollberger recalled seeing a forked stick in a museum in Texas as a boy and began experimenting with his famous "fork and lever" knapping style. Sollberger was very successful in his experiments and was soon making fine arrow heads with his rig. According to Sollberger (1978) " back in 1933 I suppose, we were just boy artifact collectors. We made this trip to San Antone to see the Witte Museum and inside they had a forked stick a little over a foot long with something like 3/4 of an inch gap between the two forks. It struck me that pressure flaking could be done with leverage by laying the biface material across this forked stick and using the fork as a fulcrum for a lever". In 1990, John Wellman spoke to Solly and said that Solly was really interested in the East Wenatchee Site in Washington and he had made several large fluted points including an eight inch Cumberland he had spend eight hours preparing and fluted off the tip. This was really advanced work for the year and to me Sollberger's work remains unsurpassed. Bob Vernon, an old time Texas knapper once conveyed this story about Sollberger to me: " If any of you ever had the privilege of sitting alongside Solly at a small knapping session, you'll remember his dry, but gentle, humor. Like the times when he would say, " That platform looks a like a strong `un- guess I better drag out ol' "he-poppa-ho" (his mega-moose billet)." Almost all Sollberger's work was in flint or chert, I have only seen one item made by Sollberger of obsidian. The obsidian point is in the collection of Steve Carter, a master flintknapper from Ramona, California. The obsidian point was very nice and very delicate, this shows the diversity in craftsmanship Sollberger had. The last time I spoke to J.B. Sollberger he was crafting a set of masterful flint Folsom points out of Texas flint. He had made quite a few thousand points in his time and was using 1,000 pounds of flint a year. Even when Sollberger was quite old he continued being very active in knapping and writing. In a letter from Sollberger to Steve Behrnes Sollberger described this incredible expedience, " My house, on Monday nights, is known as the Sollberger Clovis Factory. Joe Miller and Woody Blackwell made Tee Shirts to that name which we often wear.
