Tips for Handmade Indian Arrow Heads

An authentic-looking arrowhead can create an interesting conversation piece for your living room. To get the most authentic appearance, make the stone the old-fashioned way: with your hands. The process sounds simple, but it requires a lot of skill with a hammer, patience and an ambition to sculpt.

  1. Materials

    • When making an arrowhead by hand, you need a stone that can chip easily under pressure. Select a rock for your arrowhead that has a tendency to shed flakes as it breaks instead of cracking clear in half. The process of chipping off flakes of rock to create the arrowhead shape is called napping. A thin piece of flint or jasper will work well for this. Choose a hard metal hammer and a softer rubber hammer to perform the napping. The hammers you use should have a small head of 1-inch wide at the most. An anvil creates an effective work surface for sculpting your arrowhead.

    Outline

    • Determine the size of arrowhead you want to create before you start napping. Examine the rock you will transform into an arrowhead. On the flattest side of the stone, draw a vague outline of the arrowhead to get an idea of how large you want the arrowhead when you finish it. You will chisel off the outline as you begin the napping process, so don’t worry about leaving lasting marks.

    Napping

    • Napping takes a gentle hand and a lot of patience. If you strike the stone too hard, you might break off a larger chunk than intended, which can destroy the entire piece. Break away large pieces of stone using the hard hammer until you have the rough shape for your arrowhead. Switch to the softer hammer to do fine detail work. The soft hammer will break smaller chips from the stone, allowing you to create a pointed head instead of breaking off the entire point.

    Finishing

    • The sharp edge of the arrowhead can splinter and collapse if you leave it. Rounding the edge slightly can leave an effective arrowhead tip that can still pierce a surface, but it is less likely to break. Take a pumice stone and gently rub it across the point of the arrowhead to remove any weak sections of the stone. Sand down the dramatic ridges of the stone along the top and bottom as well. You want your arrowhead to be as smooth and aerodynamic as possible.