I'd like to see someone make a knife without using any modern technology precursors whatsoever. That means starting from using ones hands and what is available from nature in its natural form.
People already do this. Some only go so far as stone blades, or allow modern tools for certain steps. Others bootstrap the whole process from stone-age to steel.
I've never done it. It's incredibly time consuming but satisfying, from the first hand accounts I've read. You can cut hours or days off of your work time by using modern tools for some of the most seemingly trivial steps.
Search for Tai Goo, Tim Lively and Wayne Goddard. Primitive knifemaking is another good term to search.
<a href="http://www.aescustomknives.com/>Ariel Salaverria</a> doesn't do primitive as far as I know, but he does have some tutorials for making some things that most makers buy/outsource. Tutorials for resin impermeated handle materials, like denim micarta.
By "stop at steel", I meant to ask how far their bootstrapping went — did they bootstrap from stone-age materials to just, say, pre-medieval steel metallurgy? Or did they go on ahead to technologies like organic polymers, machine tools, bicycles, internal-combustion engines, vacuum tubes, semiconductors, digital computers, and heavier-than-air flying machines?
I wonder if Ariel Salaverria sells his work at handicrafts markets here locally. Maybe I could go apprentice with him :)
Just to follow-up. If you search for Tai Goo and Tim Lively you will get a lot of information, pictures, videos and such about making blades from found material. Some of the processes are pretty crude--making glue from pine sap and deer feces.
I'd like to see this taken one step further: a wiki that provides step-by-step directions for building anything from components. Links to the components and tools required would provide step-by-step directions for building them from more basic components, recursively until you're making things from absolute scratch by hand.
A wiki like this would let you jump into the process at any level, assembling something from pre-fabricated components, building it from absolute scratch, or anything in-between. I'd be curious to see how fast someone could use directions like this to start from the stone age and get to a microchip.
Fictional but a great read : in Jules Verne's Mysterious Island the heroes precisely have to make their tools, clothes, etc from scratch, up to a house, a telegraph and a boat :) a hacker's dream.
I think it'd be quite an accomplishment.