Chris, you make state-of-art tools! You are very skilled indeed, I wish I could make such beautiful handles!
The stone knife I often use is
1) much smaller than yours;
2) much more poor in execution
I have a couple of questions: do you base your knives on some models? I mean, knives found in archaeological sites, exposed in museums...?
And another one, I've heard that warming the flint in front of a fire before knapping, makes it much more accurate, but I've never tried it out, because I haven't been knapping so much lately. Did you ever tried to warm your flint?
In my town there's an Archaeological Museum, that shows the most important collection of Stone Age foundings of all the Center of Italy, except for Firenze's Museum. There are some very nice knives, dating to Eneolithic (in my region, about 3'000 b.C.): I post the two most amazing, if you think they can interest you!
This one is from Camerano, a small city near to mine:
and the other, damn I can't find a pic, but it's very similar to this one, with a longest tail, white flint, and it's HUGE, some 30 centimeters long! I'll post something as soon as possible!
But what I really like, are those tools:
the circled ones - we call them "bifacciali", in English I think it's amigdala, or something similar
- true Paleolithical power!
I like them so much that I've knapped one, with which I chop down trees: I'd like to post its pics, but this is not the proper topic
Greetings, and congratulations again!
Mauro.