Why Make a Bow?
The mysterious draw of archery aside, and ignoring the thrill of drawing a bow, aiming, and hearing the whistle and hit of the arrow, why do you want to make your own bow? Making one can be very time consuming, and requires the acquisition of messy raw materials and costly implements you might not already have. You might spend far more money on bow-making than if you simply bought a bow. And then, you have to wait! You cannot simply get the materials and the tools and instantly have a bow. No, if you harvest the wood yourself from the forest, you have to give it time to cure. If you order the materials online, you have to wait til they arrive. And even if you simply go to the hardwood dealers and buy some suitable bow woods, all you have is wood and not a bow. And of course, after all the acquiring and waiting and working, it just might break. If your goal is to shoot arrows, maybe you could skip all this nonsense and mess, and just go get yourself something to shoot with. You could buy one from me! Trust me, if you are the right type of person, bowyery can become obsessive. Your second bedroom will become your holy workshop, the storage area will be filled with logs, and the new floor will lie forgotten under its blanket of sawdust and shavings. Honestly, you could stop right here, contact me for a bow, and forget all of this. Maybe read the blog for interest’s sake, but otherwise, just shoot and save yourself the trouble. There are archers and then there are bowyers.
Resources for Budding Bowyers
If you decide you are a bowyer, and insist on going through with this, you need to learn how. You need information. Obviously the number one resource for information is the internet. Several good websites exist which are frequented by great bowyers from around the world. These artists present inspirational examples of what craftsmanship can do to a stick. They often also deign to help out newcomers. Although when I first started out making bows I bought the books, nevertheless I found it very useful to see the many photographs people post on forums, detailing every stage of their progress from wood to weapon. I still do. For me, bowyery is about experimentation and pushing limits, and I use the internet constantly for learning. With this blog, i will try to pass a little on.
That being said, there are several books on the market which you should keep your eyes open for. The Traditional Bowyer’s Bible comes in four volumes. The first one is definitely worth having, and the second has some good chapters in it, as does the fourth. The third I don’t remember much about. Billets to Bow, by Glenn St. Charles, is a very short book, anecdotal, and doesn’t have all that much to say. I understand it’s a book made after a video, and perhaps the video conveys something the book does not, but I haven’t seen it. A video I have purchased, and which I greatly recommend, is available online and is called The Korean Horn Bow. It documents all the stages involved in making this style of Asiatic composite, with little or no English being spoken, forcing you to concentrate on watching exactly what the bowmaker is doing. If you are interested in building composite bows, and if you can shut out the noise of the bowyer’s barking dog, then watching this video will take you a long way. That man is good with hand tools. In conjunction with watching it, you will also want to obtain Ottoman Turkish Bows by Adam Karpowicz. Proud to say, he’s a Canadian like me! He has gone so far as to travel to Turkey and gain permission to study the artefacts in their historical archery museum. His book presents extremely user-friendly information and many explanatory photographs which will guide you all the way through from start to finish, even down to making the gold paint!
Scope of this Blog
I hope to provide sufficient detail, photographs, and explanation to enable a person to make a shooting weapon. However, my scope is broader. I will cover the whole scope of bow making from the forest to the bench to the archery range. As time goes by, I will include step by step instructions on how to build several types of bows. Whether you want to build a fancy all-wood laminated recurve, a lumpy yew character bow, a sinew backed shortbow, a standard flatbow, a lever-tipped flatbow, or even a horn/sinew composite, you will be able to find the instructions here. Lastly, preservation and decoration will be covered, so that anyone who makes a bow can then prevent it from gaining or losing moisture, and remain in optimum shooting condition.
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