A few weeks ago I made a bow for my 7 year old son to shoot for fun. As we went looking for some young straight shoots to use for arrows I decided to try making my first arrow with a flint arrowhead.
The first thing I did was to go looking for some flint stones to make the arrowhead from. I found two equally sized rocks that I thought would work well. With no experience in the field of arrowhead making I just took one and threw it at the other one which I had placed on the ground. It took me several attempts to just hit it since I was putting a lot of force into the throws.
After a while I managed to break one of the stones into some decent pieces. One of these pieces seemed particularly suited for my purpose so I started concentrating on that one. I used the other rock to carefully hit it with as I tried not to break it in the wrong places. As the stone began to look more and more like an arrowhead to me I turned to just knabbing small pieces off the edges in the back. I wanted hollow the edges so that I could later tie some string around it when attaching it to the arrow.
I didn’t bring any special tools except my Swiss Army knife, a Victorinox Ranger, which is my EDC. I guess you don’t really need much more anyway. Except maybe a reall knabbing tool for working on the edges of the arrowhead. Anyway I turned to working on the arrow itself now. First carving off the bark to make the arrow more smooth and then sawing down the center of the thicker end of it. This was the place where I planned to fit the arrowhead into. After a bit of sizing and grinding with the file I managed to get the arrowhead in place.
I later grinded the two flaps holding the arrowhead in place down even more than you can see in these photos. I wanted to make the tip more streamlined. So now the arrowhead is ready for real fastening. My plan is to make some string from stinging netles to tie it down with and use some spruce resin for glue. If the nettle string doesn’t do the job I guess I will try to get hold of some deer sinew to prepare for this which I believe is the original method. But you will have to wait for that part to come in another blog post some time in the future when I get around to trying it.