Hi im just wondering if anyone can advice on making a Bow, ive read the post on the Bamboo Bow, but i want to make a longbow style one. Any help would be great as i have no idea were to start, many thanx
Martin
Martin
Wood for the bow
Hard, well seasoned, springy woods are best for making a bow. Dont even think about making one from softwoods such as pine, fir, new elder shoots, larch, spruce, and so on. Youll only be wasting valuable time and energy.
Look for hardwoods like wych elm, elm, oak, ash, rowan, birch, greenheart, wild rose, hornbeam, dagame, lemonwood, osage orange, juniper, and ironwood. Some of these will make a good bow, and some will make a passable one. None will make a bow equal to the king of bow woods, the yew.
Poisonous yew
Yew grows in most of Asia, the Americas and throughout Europe. Its very common in southern England, and youll see it in churchyards, estates, parks and gardens.
Be careful with the yew. The leaves, berry arils (an extra covering over the fruit) and sap contain a deadly nerve poison, taxine. Celtic warriors dipped their arrows in the yew sap, just to make sure!
So dont use the leftovers from your bowmaking as skewers or spoons or whatever. You wont come to any harm from handling yew, though, as long as you wash the sap off your hands.
A quick one
You can make an excellent bow very quickly - seasoning the wood in a day, over a fire from rowan. (This is sometimes called mountain ash in England).
Ideally you should take the wood from a slim sapling growing in dense wood. This is because trees growing close together have to shoot for the sun, and so grow slim and straight with few branches low on the trunk: just what you need foor a bow. You dont harm the environment by taking a few of these sapplings, since you help the other trees to spread. And if you cover or dirty the stump, you wont leave any sign of your presence to be spotted from the air.
Rowan bows are sweet to use, giving no jar or kick. But they do creak ominously when youre shooting them in. It takes fine judgement and a steely nerve to find out how far you can draw them but then a good bow properly drawn is seven-eights broken!
The correct size of a bow
A bow 1.47m (4ft 10 in) long, is quite handy for someone of 1.75m (5ft 9 in). A longbow for someone this height would be 1.85m (6ft) long. When deciding what length to make your bow, consider the following:
1. The longer the bow is, the better it will resist a given pull.
2. If you change your mind and shorten an excisting bow it will shoot further for the same draw but will be harder to pull and is more likely to break.
3. Experiment to find your ideal draw length and try to make your bowto suit, but any bow drawing between 60 and 90 cms (2 to 3 ft) will sufficient for most survival archery. A bow should not bend in the middle the central foot or so should be rigid. To determine the position of the handgrip, find the centre of the bow, then mark 75mm (3 in) below and 25mm (1 in) above. This section will be the handle. The arrow is shot from the bow centre while you grip beneath it.
The upper part of the bow should be cut slightly more than the lower in order to compensate for the handle. Trim your bow to its finished size, then cut the nocks at either end.
Tools
Once youve selected your bow stave, youll need some tools to carve the actual bow from it. Professional bowmakers first use a hammer and steel wedges to split logs into workable dimensions. Then a small hand-axe trims the stave to the rough shape and size of the bow. A spokeshave brings it down to the exact size, with final minute shavings removed with shards of glass.
[Snip]
Stanley knife blades are of some great use aswell. Either for bowmaking or arrow (heads).
Season the wood
[Snip]
In conventional the entire log is seasoned, sometimes for years (edit: author advices to season wood for a longbow for at least 3 years), and then thinned down to a bow. Survivors have to reverse the process, and cut out the rough bow and then dry it. This is a lot faster, though it may cause some warping. Trim the stave to the approximate size of the bow, leaving a good quarter inch surplus in both thickness and breadth.
Drying out
At this point, decide how quickly you need your bow. Some woods you can use straight off, but all of them improve enormously with drying out. In a very hot climate a day or two makes a huge difference, and the bow keeps improving as you use it. In cold or temperate climates you will have to dry it over or near the fire. Yew and rowan make the best quick-dried bows.
Will you have the bow near the fire, you may as well make sure the stave is straight when viewed from the back or belly.
If you heat or preferably, steam the staff where its bent, you can put it permanently into shape by applying pressure in the right direction. This doent set up any stresses in the wood.
You can also re-curve or reflex the bow by the same method. But if the stave youve chosen is naturally reflexed, or re-curved at one end or the other, dont straighten it. If it aint broke, dont fix it!
Making the string
The English longbowmen of the Middle Ages used bow strings able to take a weight of 140 lbs (60 kg), and these were made from the stalks of the common stinging nettle. Unfortunately this takes a long time to master, so the average survivor must improvise. Silk is ideal for a bow string because its stretches very little, but it is not available in every survival situation. Nylon paracord is a more feasible material. Although it does stretches a little, this can be taken up when bracing the bow and paracord has the bonus of being near rot-proof and very strong.
Bracing a bow
Putting the string on a bow is called bracing, and it is very important to get this right. Place your hand thumbs upon the back of the bow: the string should touch your thumb when correctly braced. You need not be too slavish to this rule with a survival bow, but the nearer the better. Use a timber hitch to tie the bottom end of the string permanently in place and use a simple loop to attach it at the top. When you need the bow, brace it and slip on the top loop. Always unstring the bow when not in use or it will lose strength and never leave it standing on end.
stovie said:
Ahjno said:
Didn't knew we had one ...
ohwell, now we have some more
What, not on Lovely Grub?Now there's a thread we could start on flora & fauna
C_Claycomb said:Some see this as a problem, they think there is too much information for someone who only wants to make one bow, and stop.
Swampy Matt said:People only think they want to make one bow and stop.
Be warned - bowmaking is highly addictive
shadow57 said:Hello ....great article .....but slight error
......surely a shorter bow resists a given pull...levers etc
or maybe I'm wrong.. John
stovie said:So my wife keeps telling me; and i've yet to start on my self bow :twak:
shadow57 said:......surely a shorter bow resists a given pull...levers etc
or maybe I'm wrong.. John