Identifiying Flint Chert and other Sparking Rocks

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Tags: Hunting,Camping,Hiking,Primitive Skills,Archery,Dual Survival,Flint Knapping,traps,trapping,fishing,Discovery Channel,hand drill,bow drill,fire steel,shelter,water,navigation,char cloth

Video Transcription

morning I'm Dave Canterbury at the Pathfinder school we had some recent questions for some people how to identify Flint a lot of you guys that have been doing this stuff for a long time already know how to do that it's really not as important to identify Flint as is to identify a hard stone so we're going to talk about that a little bit for a minute and we're going to walk around this creek bed and see if we can find Flint is kind of a misnomer here in the United States because Flint actually occurs more in Europe than it does in the u.s. most of us in the US is in the chert family of rocks and minerals and Flint is usually identified as a very black dark colored rock that they use for like gun Flint's and things like that over in Europe the best qualities of Flint come from Europe not the United States but many arrowheads atlatl gun Flint's and things like that in strikers were made from chert material which is also called Flint here in the United States but anything that has a hardness on the Mohs hardness scale of seven or more will strike sparks off of any high carbon object like a knife or a flint striker or a metal striker I should say so to identify Flint is not necessary if you're just looking to make sparks for fire you need to identify something that's hardness of at least seven and quartz is a very familiar Rock and most people and quartz has a hardness of seven in fact on the Mohs scale

quartz is the name that's used for hardness of seven is quartz not sure not Flint but Chet Flint and shirt have a hardness of seven as well so we're going to walk right out this creek and look around a little bit and see if we can find some examples of both court and shirt so I can kind of show you what those things look like okay I'm trying to get the light right on this out here in this creek bed there are a lot of remnants of worked pieces from the woodland period and the Edina Hopewell out here in Ohio if you look at this piece it is kind of quite what's called cortex that you can see on the top of it which is more like a chalk or limestone most of what you'll find in Ohio has a limestone type cortex and underneath that there's a smooth gray surface and you can when you rub that with your hand let me get that wet for a minute for you when you rub that with your hand it feels very very smooth and something like this if you can find a sharp edge or nap a sharp edge on it then you could knock it against your knife if it's high carbon steel and see if it will strike sparks because really the best way to test for a sparking Rock is to actually test it so we're going to try that too in just a minute if I can knock something off okay so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to try to find an anvil here and get an edge it's exposed up in the air and get a hammer stone and just try to knock a corner off you see how that broke out right there okay so that's not a very good Concordia fracture that you would have if you were napping Flint but that's a freeze fracture because this is above ground it's not going to nap very well like Flint would but just breaking a shard off and giving yourself a sharp edge like that is really all you need to check and see if it will strike sparks off your knife so I'm going to pull out my blind horse bushcrafter here and I know that it's high carbon steel so if it will strike sparks and I can't see very well out here they've got to get it up against something dark and you can see it better if it's striking sparks at all there it goes a couple sparks came out there you just got to find the good sharp edges yeah I thirst some sparks coming off that and I hope you can see that so that's a piece of Flint for sure and we'll walk around we'll see if we can find some stuff that's a different color and maybe even some quartz I see another piece laying right over here another example you can see the white cortex around it the dark color on the inside where the cortex is gone that's also a piece of Flint just like this is again you have to knock a sharp edge off of that with some type of hammer stone if you could and you can see that's a pretty much a Concordia fracture that came out of that piece of Flint that's very typical of chert and Flint to do that if you can nap something off of it like that and get a piece out of it then you know pretty cool sure that you've got Flint because if it'll knock a fracture out that comes out just like if you busted your windshield or broke one down your house a shot at the BB gun and it punches out that cone that's exactly what's happening right here so you know you've got a piece of Flint and that again would work to strike sparks off of a high carbon implement like your knife okay this right here is a piece of quartz it's not smoothed over like the one we had before in the creek this is more of a rose color quartz but it will all work if we can just snap an edge on till it's um let's see if we can work it might have put it on the handle to get it to really break a chunk off all right guys I actually had to hit down a hammer pole in the back of my axe to get that piece to break off of there that's how hard that stuff is then it finally broke in three pieces so now I've got a sharp edge you know I can test that again and see if it's going to throw sparks probably can you see that I can't see it so sure you can't see it guys

I saw one fly off of there well if you can see it on and sometimes this stuff is just try on there I can see a few sparks coming off of here now and then but it's not near as well sparking at this point as this piece of chert was but this stuff will work this is a pretty grainy coarse piece of quartz it's not solid and clear like the other one was it was rounded off but this will work an emergency beyond the shot of it out

you just got to get the right edge on there and it will work as I swing sparks coming off of this we're just few and far between sometimes that's what you have to do is just pick up rocks and try them until you get one it does work all right guys well we took a short walk around we found a little bit of chert and we found a little bit of quartz and like I said you do one of those rocks will work if you've got a lot of limestone in your area chances are you're going to have quartz chances are you're probably going to have some Flint or chert as it's called in your area as well you just got to get used to identifying it on the fly and like I said once you find a piece that works for you don't get rid of it hang on to it don't just think you're going to go out and find a piece of Flint but you have to go out and experiment with this stuff and that's part of learning and that's you know how the Pathfinder system works it's trial and error and it's learning together and it's also you going out and checking these things for yourself and verifying what works and what doesn't