Iron Tools Made from Nails.
The spike on the far left is a typical European nail of the seventeenth-eighteenth century. The second example has been hammered flat at the tip, perhaps to make a hide scraper. Projectile points were made by flattening the shaft of a nail just below the head. The head and flared shaft (centre object) was probably discarded. The resulting shaft was hammered and ground into a point; the original point of the nail was inserted into a wooden arrow or lance shaft. The two examples on the right show a projectile point with the blade broken in half, and a projectile point with the tip missing.

Reproduced by permission of Dr. Ralph Pastore, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, Newfoundland. Photo ©1983.