Otm-flint Manufactory at Brandon. f f 7 



butchers' blocks, and a small stump before each serves as a seat ; 

 another stump is used to sit upon when " flaking" is being done. 

 Each block is nearly buried in flint debris and waste chips, 

 and the whole flints for breaking up are stacked up on the 

 opposite side of the shed. The process of reducing these natural 

 masses of flint to marketable gun-flints is as follows : — The 

 workman sits down upon the flaking block, and puts on a stout 

 leathern apron ; he then buckles on his left leg, above the knee, 

 a thick pad faced with strong leather. Having finished these 

 preliminaries, he takes up a flint, often one of forty or fifty 

 poimds in weight, and placing it on this pad he breaks it into 

 little pieces of about eight pounds weight with a short massive 

 hammer, called a quartering hammer. This is apiJarently done 

 with the greatest ease, the pieces coming off as if they were lumps 

 of chocolate instead of flint. An idea, however, of the difficulty 

 of the operation to anyone but a skilled workman may be formed 

 from the fact that the quartering hammer, though of steel, 

 becomes in a comparatively short time battered and turned as if 

 it were lead. We also ascertained upon inquiry that the leg of 

 the workman, though protected by the pad, becomes hard and 

 insensible to delicate feeling. 



The large blocks of flint being thus quartered, the same man 

 takes up another hammer, called a flaking hammer, which is some- 

 what like a stone-breaker's hammer, bluntly pointed at either end, 

 and it is also of steel. Selecting one of the pieces of flint, he places 

 it on his pad, with a fractured black face uppermost, and with the 

 side of the flaking hammer he breaks off all the outside crust or 

 rough irregular flint. Having done this he strikes a sharp blow 

 with the thin end of the hammer, about half an inch from the edge 

 of the now clean black lump of flint, and this blow strikes ofi' a long 

 flake usually an inch in width, and from three to seven inches long, 

 according to the thickness of the flint. These flakes are struck 

 off in rapid succession, until nothing is left but the rough crust 

 on the opposite side of the lump. When all the batch has been 

 flaked up, the long knife-like pieces are turned out on to the big 

 block before referred to. This block has a piece of steel, very 

 much like a broad chisel fixed perpendicularly in it, and a 

 hammer is used, called a knapping hammer, which is a flat 

 piece of steel about six inches in length by one inch wide, and 

 very thin ; this is fixed horizontally into a handle. The flakes 

 are held across the "stake," as the chisel-like arrangement is 

 called, and struck with the laiappiug hammer ; this flakes off 

 pieces about the size and shape of a gun-flint, and a tap or two 

 more completes the implement. The rapidity with which a 

 skilled workman can produce gun-flints is remarkable, and the 

 difiiculty which a novice encounters on trying to fabricate a 

 gun-flint is equally striking. 



