When to Stop Thinning a Stone

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm John Olsen for Expert Village. Well, we've got our thinning process going on and we've got it fairly thin. Except now I need to be a little more careful, a little smaller flakes, and thin this thing out a little bit more and kind of decide what I want to make. Kind of in the process and that will, if I run into any problems might change my mode of thinking here, but right now it's just a nice flat piece and I'm going to really detail it out right now. Still doing what we call percussion flaking. So, I'm not going to be as fast. I'm going to take a little more time looking at places I want to pull flakes off of. And I'm really going to be concerned about evenness right now. This is kind of the time when you sometimes break them. Hopefully we'll be o.k. on it. A lot of times I'll make a piece like this and really spend a lot of time examining it and planning my next strike. Especially if it's a really nice rock. Now I hit that twice and nothing happened. That means I've got, not a very good prepared platform. I'm going to change it a little bit by rubbing this rock and taking off some small flakes and moving that medium line over into this fat area, this edge. See how the edge comes and then dips down right there? It dips down right to where my problem is. So, I should get it with one hit and it shouldn't do what it was doing early, nothing happening. There it went. Looking very good. There's our original hinge where it dipped out, which is not a problem if I take a small flake into it. Be kind of hard to cross that little valley I've got right here, but it looks like we're going to be fine. O.k. a few more pieces on here and we'll have something we can go to the next process with."