ELECTRIC TAPE AND
SUPERGLUE
By D.C. Waldorf
Within the last couple of months, two interesting things happened in my shop that may or may not be worthy of reporting because I do this sort of thing all the time, mostly when nobody’s looking!
The first incident actually had a witness. This was a fellow who stopped by and wanted me to make a Dalton point for him, sort of an “arrowheads while you wait” situation. I guess he had nothing better to do for entertainment. Actually I wasn’t too busy at the time, so I hammed it up a bit. However, the piece I was working on was not of a humorous nature. It had one particularly grungy spot that I was keeping a close eye on, as I worked around it. I pointed this out and said, “This is going to come back to haunt me in the final stage.” Sure enough, on cue, a step fracture appeared in that spot in the field of an otherwise near-perfect, oblique-flaked face. I said, “If this is going to be the way it is, it’s time for some wizard stuff.”
I took my carborundum abrader and spat on it, then ground the step flake down level to the rest of the surface. Seeing that there was still a bit of the step left, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get it without really reaching deep into my bag of tricks. The next announcement really floored the guy. “Pardon me, I need to go get a piece of electrical tape. I know, it has nothing to do with the Stone Age, but this is wizard stuff.” As I left the shop I could see his blank stare; he must have thought I had gone off the deep end. If it had not worked, the spell would have definitely been broken. However, I knew that what I was going to do had a 75% track record for percussion, as I had used it before.
I went into the house where I kept my model ship stuff, and got out my black electrical tape. I cut off a piece that was just a little wider than the predicted flake, and long enough to reach all the way across the face, and lap over the opposite edge. When I returned, I placed one end of the tape about 1/16th of an inch in from the platform. I stretched it out along the predicted path of the flake, then over the edge while stroking it down with my fingernail, good and tight, pushing it in the direction that the flake was to travel. Electrical tape is elastic and will try to pull the flake through the hinge automatically, as it recoils.
The reason I had to do this was because I rest my work on a pad on the bench, and since I had to hold the point firmly at the proper angle, I could not reach around to pull the flake at the same time. I had to use the tape to do the pulling for me. If I had tried to awkwardly position my finger, things would have lined up in such a way that upon release, the flake or the tip of the pressure flaker would have got me. If I had used a hard pad and worked between my legs with an Ishi stick, it may or may not have worked. You still have to have something there to pull on the flake as it is coming off, so that it jumps the hinge. At any rate, it worked and the customer left satisfied. He advised that I should keep this sort of thing to myself because, “It works for you, and nobody would believe it anyway.” In actuality, several others have witnessed this same demonstration, when I used a stretchable tape to pull fluting flakes through a hinge fracture on the base of a Clovis point. This is the first time I had ever tried it for an oblique pressure flake.
The presence or absence of support to the face where the pressure flake is being removed, and the way the force is applied, has quite a bearing on the end result. Perhaps a little discussion on this would be pertinent here. I have observed at knap-ins the two most common but different ways of supporting a preform, while it is being pressure flaked. In one method, the piece is held in the hand in a soft leather pad, which is in contact with the surface all the time while the flake is peeling off. With this type of support, I see quite a lot of “hangnail terminations” instead of the flakes feathering out. The other method is to use a hard rubber or leather pad, having a slot in which the flake is released freely. This will often times result in a cleaner termination, when the angle of force is correctly applied, while rolling the preform and the tool towards each other in such a way that the flake is initiated, followed through, and terminated precisely. This takes a lot of practice to fully master. Again, if the force is applied exactly right, either method will work without hangs.
Outside of my bench rest technique, the second rarest method is that used by Jim Spears and a few of his followers. The preform is supported by pushing it firmly into a pad on the leg. Depending on the hardness of the pad, this can produce pretty much the same results as the above.
When I work off the bench, only the edge is supported, as I hold the point up at the proper angle. The face does not touch the pad, so the flakes are free to come off and feather out. I am also able to see better what I am doing, and get the angles just right, because my nose is literally inches away from the work. The bonus is that I almost never get cut and my work is extremely clean, without those tiny steps. However, don’t feel bad if you are getting some hangnails, because I have a broken Type I-C Danish dagger in my possession that is beautifully oblique flaked, and there must be a dozen tiny hangnails still hanging in there, after 4500 years! This may very well have been a piece that was plowed up from a considerable depth, because freezing will sometimes remove most of the hangnails. However, I have also seen Paleo pieces which were much older that still had them. The absence or presence of hangnails is often used by “authenticators” as criteria for determining an original piece. In this case, it is more the result of the way the ancient artisan worked, and not the age of the artifact.
None of the above pressure flaking methods has a pulling element that would force the flake to continue on its course and finally feather out. If you can support the flake and pull it at the same time, it can be made to jump hinges and dive under humps, which has a flattening effect on the convexity of the surface. I have even pulled them obliquely into hinge fractures from the side, forcing the flake to circle around and take the hinge off from behind. This is easily done with percussion by placing your fingers in the area where the flake is to be removed and pulling hard. So hard in fact, that sometimes I snap the tendons in my fingers, and it hurts for a minute, but it gets the job done. Pressure is another matter, as mentioned before, that’s why I used the tape, which not only confined the flake, but pulled on it as well.
The other incident occurred with virtually no witnesses and if I said nothing about it here, no one would be the wiser. But that would be contrary to the purpose of this magazine, which is education, even if I have to admit to an embarrassing situation. In this case, 99% of the cure is prevention, but we’re writing about the 1%. Nobody gets credit for preventing a disease, but the doctor becomes the hero when he saves the patient, whose deadly disease could easily have been prevented, had he taken the proper precautions.
In this case, the victim was a 30-pound chunk of premium Georgia Flint River, coastal plain chert, 16” long and 9” wide by 3-4” thick. This I had been saving for when I had the guts and the energy to attempt a monster dagger, which I knew lay somewhere within that ugly mass. As I skinned the cortex off, I was very disappointed to uncover a chalky spot dead center in the middle, on both faces. The rest of it was as clear as molasses. My previous experience with this material told me that the chalk went all the way through, so I decided to deliberately break the block in half. In this case I could get two, 9” pieces, if I could work out the blanks kitty-corner. How I did this was to use a copper billet to percussion flake a rough notch on both sides of the block, so that when struck, it would break between the notches and through the hole. Mistake #1: there was a full inch of good, solid raw material running through the center of the hole. Oh well, now I had two chances at a good, if much smaller, dagger, not the 12-inch “Hindsgavl dagger” size I was dreaming of. Nonetheless, the color, which approximated that of bog-patinated Danish flint, would still make it worth the effort.
Now this material was so tough that it had to be heat treated, so I put both the blanks in my roaster oven filled with vermiculite, running up the temperature at 50° per hour until I reached 375°. There I held it overnight, shutting the oven down in the morning, and by late afternoon I was able to get the blanks out. They were warm to the touch, but not hot. Vermiculite is not very pleasant stuff to get on your hands or to breath. I have been told recently that this material may be a cancer-causing agent, so I have since switched back to using sand. Anyway, I wanted to wash the remnants of vermiculite off, so I got a bucket of water and swished the blanks around, laying them out on the porch to dry. As I did so, I heard the sickening sound that a revolver hammer makes when it strikes a dud round. Mistake #2: This particular material is far more sensitive to heat than I thought, as I could easily have done this with Burlington chert, and gotten away with it.
The first blank I tried, the best one, fell into three pieces, the cracks going all the way through. The other one had been a little cooler when dunked, and I worked it down with morbid fascination, discovering that two cracks were all that stood between me and a potential masterpiece dagger. The most dangerous crack was on the edge, and it went all the way through. The other was near the handle/blade juncture; I couldn’t be sure of how far it had penetrated, but I guessed about ¼”. At any rate, every flake I threw across these cracks stopped. I had to do something to try to get them to hold together long enough to chip them away. I was desperate because a lot was at stake here. I had a considerable amount of money invested in that stone, and it was the color I needed for a potential back cover of my dagger book. Then I remembered the cartoon that Larry Scheiber had done in a recent issue of CHIPS, Vol. 15, #1, with a guy and his Superglue. Well the blank wasn’t broken, but it was going to be unless I could do something. I knew for a fact that the capillary action of Superglue is legendary.
Just weeks earlier I had a miss-hap where this was made abundantly clear. The mechanism that rotates the foremast on one of my square rigged ship models had broken loose. So I reached down in through the hatch and put a spot of Superglue on the arm. It went up the mast and into the collar, which keeps the water on deck from coming into the hold; it froze the entire mechanism! The space between these two parts wasn’t even the thickness of a sheet of thin paper.
So now I was going to put this glue to a real test. The day I applied it was real dry, and this was good because Superglue is activated by the presence of moisture in the air. I figured it would have plenty of time to seep down into those cracks before setting up. I left the piece lay overnight, giving it a good 24 hours to set up. When the flakes were driven off in the area of the crack near the edge, I was pleasantly surprised. They came off as if the flint was solid. However, they broke after detachment, where-in I noticed a thin, glossy film of glue adhering to the broken pieces. The dagger survived percussion flaking without going to pieces, partly due to the glue and partly to the caution I used, which later cost me. I had to pull my punches a bit, and I did not get the contours I needed, forcing me to grind almost the entire dagger, including the median ridge on the handle, where the stitching was to run. After this operation, the cracks were still present, though barely visible under the frosted surface left by the grinding. Fig. 2 shows the blank ground before flaking. Note the position of the two cracks, enhanced with a black line and a circle.
Even after heat treatment, this material was still quite tough, and for the work on the shoulders and the upper 2/3 of the blade, I had to use my power flaker, (see CHIPS, Vol. 7, #1, 1995). This blew massive, straight-in pressure flakes off the surface, reducing the thickness by 1/3. My normal procedure for Type IV daggers is to flake one face completely, then reset the platforms and flake the other face, after which the edge is retouched, if a second pass is not needed. On IVD-E daggers such as this one, the backside or obverse face is flaked first, because it is flatter in the handle area. The blade is widest after grinding and heavier platforms can be set; so this face can be aggressively flaked without worrying about messing up the handle contours. After the platforms are reset to get the front side or obverse face, the blade is a little narrower, so the flakes don’t have to travel so far to go past a pencil line drawn down the center of the blade. It is critical that the first series taken off the one edge of either face does this, which helps to insure that a grinding patch is not stranded. The edge and direction you work to get these longer flakes will depend upon the ergonomics of your personal technique. In other words, you will be able to take longer flakes working either from tip to handle, or the opposite. Due to the incredible amount of pressure that can be generated with the power flaker, I always start at the shoulders or the widest point of the blade and work towards the tip, where the blade drops below 1 & ¾” wide, then I switch to hand pressure where 1” oblique flakes can easily lap over the median. This change of tools and techniques are clearly observed on the left hand side of the completed dagger.
Because of the cracks, I had to alter my routine. The longest flakes were removed from the right hand margin on the backside first in order to deal with the crack on the edge, which was leaning at a slight outward angle. By removing the most powerful flakes into the outward leaning crack, the crack acted as a second platform and the flakes continued on, instead of skipping off and leaving a slightly inward-angled “wall,” as it would have been on the other face. This is the same situation you run into when attempting to “pick“ flakes off a hinge or step that leans towards the tip of the tool. If it is away from the tool, the tool slips off and you don’t get the flake. Even with the glue, I did not want to take any chances here.
To shoot through the crack in the shoulder area on the front face, the long flakes were removed off the left hand margin. In this case, I wasn’t so concerned because any hinges that occurred here after picking-off, could be further leveled when the stitch flakes came out to take the rest off, from behind. However, here too, the massive pressure flake managed to hop the crack and then split into two flakes before continuing on. In this case, it resembled two pick-offs, when in reality it wasn’t.
By the time I was ready to remove the flakes from the opposite edges and faces, the margins had been worked back far enough that the crack on the blade had almost disappeared, with only 1/8” of it left. This disappeared completely with a second series of flakes that had to be removed from that edge, in order to correct the symmetry in the blade. As you can see on the photo of the front face of the finished dagger, these flakes are shorter and the pattern is somewhat muddled. This is typical when a second pass has to be made. A small remnant of the second crack in the shoulder area remains and is highlighted by a black line superimposed on the photo. This could be perceived as a slight flaw in the flaking, but most of the flaws that require pick-offs, occur in this area, so technically it is authentic for a Type IV dagger. Anyway, when all was said and done, after five days of nursing and cursing, I got my dagger. Even though it was only 8 & 1/2 “ long, it was a very pretty one and well worth the effort.
Outside of some very technical dribble that actually can be applied to projects other than daggers, I hope that the readers will take to heart a couple of simple lessons from this ordeal. First of all, don’t get so anxious; let your material go dead cold in the kiln before rinsing off the sand or vermiculite. Secondly, you may want to apply Superglue to a crack BEFORE the piece breaks, and see if it works. It’s worth a try. Also, as Jim Redfearn demonstrates in his latest video, “Stupid Glue” works quite well for plugging holes in one’s person. Don’t leave home without it!