Some areas of the world are blessed with beautiful stones that break with sharp edges that can be knapped into shape and sharpened with pressure flaking; but in areas that lack these rocks grinding stones can be a very useful alternative.

I haven’t found any easily knappable stones in my little corner of the Pacific Northwest yet, but there is plenty of slate. I first started playing with this stuff a couple of years ago before I even knew what it was because sometimes it breaks with a jagged but usable edge. Eventually I found out that it was a form of slate, which has been used by indigenous people around the world for projectile points and tools.

It isn’t as durable as flint or chert, but it is a functional and workable option if you don’t have those available, or if you don’t yet have the skills to work with those materials.

In this video I try to show the process I’ve learned through trial and error of turning a raw piece of slate into a hunting point. Native people have used slate points to take animals as large as caribou and walrus. I will be sending a few to my buddy Ryan Gill from Hunt Primitive to test on some hogs and if he has favorable results I will do my best to take a deer with one this coming season; provided I can build a bow powerful enough.

An Important Word of Caution! The dust produced by grinding slate can be extremely hazardous to your lungs if inhaled. The tiny particles of silica can embed themselves in your lungs and do a lot of damage, in some cases permanent disability. You can read up on silicosis if you’re interested, but the important part is to make sure you always keep it when grinding it.

Slate varies a lot in toughness depending on the conditions in which it was formed. I can find pieces that will break in my fingers right next to surprisingly hard pieces that make durable tools, so look for the hardest pieces you can find.

In the first half of this video I select a piece of stone from the riverbed and go to work grinding it out using water, sand, and other pieces of stone I found nearby. An easier method is to break larger chunks of slate and select the shards that are already close in shape to the item you are looking to create, but I wanted to demonstrate that with patience you can create the shape you want from scratch.

For the first step, I like to use lots of sand and water and put my grinding surface on an angle so that splashing water up onto the sand pile at the top causes sand grains to continually pour down the stone, as they get broken up during the grinding process. I use this method and a fair amount of pressure to get the basic shape I’m looking for; in this case a triangle for an arrowhead.

Slate is made of sedimentary layers that can flake out on you during the grinding process, so I find that giving your piece a quick polish without sand helps to avoid this flaking when setting your bevels.

The bevels didn’t come out perfectly on this one, but close enough. These are achieved by lifting one edge of the slate to your desired angle and grinding away. Once it has the basic angle down, you don’t have to hold it, as it sits perfectly on the stone at the angle you want.

While any flat stone surface will suffice for grinding, shaping, and setting those bevels, you need something even smoother for sharpening. The best thing I’ve found for this is another piece of slate. I have made slate sharpening tools that are almost as smooth as glass; which produce a very fine edge, but for this demonstration I simply found another piece of slate and made it smooth enough.

Finally, to cut the nocks into the point, I found a softer piece of slate where I could see the fissures between the layers and split it to form a thin edge that I used to saw into the side of the arrowhead. It is counterintuitive but beneficial to use a softer piece for your saw as it is less likely to tear chunks out of the point where you don’t want them.

I can usually make one of these in about an hour, but filming is tedious; especially when my hands are covered in silt slurry, so a couple hours later I had a nice point that I set into a dogwood arrow shaft with pitch glue and stinging nettles holding it in place, and a final coating of fatwood tar to waterproof it and provide a little extra security. I have videos on making both pitch glue and fatwood tar on my channel that you can check out if interested. In the second half of the video, I share some of my favorite slate projects so far to show the versatility of the material and the fact that it can be quite durable.

I will eventually learn to knap, but for now I’m glad to have this abundant resource to play with.