For all the jackboot lickers who insist that laws are morality and must be followed, I submit this exhibit:
The same exhibit illustrates just how common ingredients for weapons are. Humans have been making serviceable weapons since before Paleolith, and that knowledge isn’t going away short of extinction of the species and wipeout of all records.
I make and use paleolithic weapons and tools. Not only is it a fun hobby , but it is the best survival training you can do. When every tool and weapon you could ever need is already all around you.. how could you lose?
I would hope that the federal law means “You can’t re-fill this bottle” and not “You can’t re-purpose this glass.”
I’m not holding my breath, though.
It was simply required to be on the bottles from 1933 to 1964 as part of the post-prohibition liquor laws (it was only on liquor bottles).
The idea was somehow “to stop bootlegging”, though it’s not obvious to me how that was more of an effective mode than going after tax evasion…
(See here for the period document requiring it (top of second page from link).
The actual prohibition appears to be in 175.13 and 175.14 and does apply only to retail sale of liquor, not private re-purposing or even refilling.)
Heh. If you walk up and down power line right of ways, you can sometimes find old ceramic insulators that are broken and discarded. They also make excellent projectile points, somewhat tougher than glass, but not quite as sharp.
/Knapper myself
I’d be a bit nervous about leaving chunks of glass in anything I intended to eat!!!
Merle
Have you hunted with a modern rifle? The bullet goes in making a little tiny hole, but then it makes a big, ragged, cone-shaped wound. If you shoot big game such as a deer through the lungs, there’s very little meat there to damage unless you hit the heart (heart is otherwise good meat). If you hit the same animal through the shoulders though, or hit the back-strap, you’ve torn up a lot of good meat there, inundating it with bone fragments and some lead.
The point is that if you’re shooting the meat, you’re making something of a mistake, and that mistake (or less-than-ideal shot) with your rifle will cost you some meat. If you lose a little bit trying to avoid glass fragments you’re not losing any more than if you made the same shot with a high powered rifle. Probably less, but that’s assuming you can make the same mistake with a bow and still catch up to the animal before it gets away.
If you’re into bow hunting though, and making your own arrowheads, I’m sure you’ll find a way to make metal ones if you’re worried about a chip of glass or stone getting in your mouth. The video we saw here shows a stunt. A neat trick. It doesn’t say a glass arrowhead is a good idea when you have alternatives.
Actually, they *ARE* a good alternative. They’re actually sharper than steel, and won’t shatter or break unless they’ve hit bone square-on. Even then, they don’t just break into a million tiny pieces, just a very few that have a distinct shape.
There is nothing inherently wrong or extra dangerous about hunting with knapped arrowheads vs. steel ones, and there are some decided advantages.
Plus, any animal you take with an arrow you made yourself completely from scratch, including knapping the arrowhead, gives you bigger bragging rights. “Oh, that’s a nice 10 pointer. Got that with your whiz-bang tricked out 300 fps+ Darden and your carbon arrows with the mechanical broadhead and blazer vanes, did you? You should see this doe I killed using nothing but a wooden bow and a homemade arrow with a flint tip”.
Nice!
It was said in the 19th century that a stone arrowhead made a nastier wound than a Minnie ball. I know that in soft tissue a knapped point will cause more bleeding than anything I can fire out of my flintlock. I can also put five to seven aimed arrows in the air for every shot from a front stuffer, and I’m not all that good with a bow
Which is why any good military these days issues bows to their infantry instead of firearms?
What did that have to do with anything I wrote? Or is trolling just your hobby? AND: WTF does flint knapping have to do with military anything? Oh yeh, right; TROLL.
I don’t think you’re making a favorable impression when you apply the epithet “troll” to someone as obviously un-troll-like as Lyle.
That said, there’s a good question here. You can get off more shots with a bow and arrow than with a muzzleloader. So why were muzzleloaders adopted? The obvious answer is that they have advantages that (in many cases) outweigh the disadvantage of lower rate of fire.
I can think of some examples: longer range; easier to learn to use effectively; useable by people who lack upper body strength.
A good man with an English long bow could fire 12 to 15 aimed shots per min. BUT: It took a lifetime of training to make him worth taking to war. You could train a “musketeer” in about two weeks. Musketeers were disposable. Bowmen weren’t. The musket actually has a MUCH shorter range than the English war bow as the smoothbore musket used from 1400-1830ish had a range of 50- 75 yards. An English warbow has an average range of 200 to 400 yards. The war bow had a rate of fire 10 to 30 times greater than a musket and four times its penetration. BUT: Muskets were cheep,one would last for generations and you could teach a sickly peasant to use one in about two weeks. Stout health Yoman(spell?) archers are expensive and have to be trained and maintained for a lifetime.
So it sounds like you’re saying Lyle was right.
Just to spell it out, Ray’s comparison was between muzzleloading rifles and bows, not bows and M-16s or AK-47s.
The other comparison isn’t surprising. Arrowheads designed for big game, whether they are steel broadheads or the DIY variety, kill by causing bleeding.
On occasion I’ve wondered if Corian could be used to make a useable knife. It (and stone or glass) would be interesting since it’s non-metallic. This pattern: http://www.hideawayknife.com/concept.php would be interesting to try.
Paul the # 1 problem with stone or glass blades is how brittle they are. One that small would snap under almost any side load. Look up an Inuit tool called the “oolu”(spell?) It is a skinning blade in a wood handle. It has the best side load strength I know of for a stone blade. Common use palio blades that small(your project) were just flakes from larger projects that were discarded when they broke. I have never Knapped “Corian” . Any other Knappers tried it?
-ulu-
I see what you mean about the hideaway knife being a poor fit to the properties of stone or glass.
As for Corian, I wasn’t all that clear. It’s not brittle in that way, so I don’t think that “knapping” would apply the way it does to stone. Instead, its normally shaped by cutting and grinding. The bits I’m wondering about is how it does for strength, and whether it can hold an acceptable edge.
How so? What I said was that it took twenty years to train a healthy archer to a usable combat standard. It took less than a month to train any plague ridden , press ganged cull off the street. But Long Bows were ALWAYS superior combat weapons when compared to smooth bore muskets. The musket just allowed the king to pocket more gold, and kill off the “useless”. Another thing it gave the royals was a disarmed populous that couldn’t fight back when the king marched in for whatever form of rape or looting he fancied that week.