I’ve been working on a wooden longbow most of the afternoon. Here are ten easy steps for making your own 🙂
1. Cut down a tree
2.Split that tree into lengthwise sections called staves. The dog will help
3. Build a woodshed
4. Let those staves dry for a few years in the shed
5. Remove all the shit that isn’t a bow. The dog will help again by lying on your foot
6. Make sure the handle stays centered in the growth rings
7. Steam bend and weight the wood so that both limbs start with the same bend
8. Slowly remove wood from the belly of the bow on both sides until they bend evenly
9. Add tip overlays, handle wraps, and all the fancy crap
10. Go out in the yard and practice till hunting season starts
I may need to drive to town for some human contact.
😮
Any particular wood? What was it here? I always meant to try making a bow out of my parents’ overgrown yew shrubbery, but that didn’t work out.
Pictured in the compilation above are shagbark hickory, hop-hornbeam, and common buckthorn. While English yew is rightfully considered one of the best bow woods, almost any straight grained hardwood can make a very nice bow. You can even use maple boards from the hardware store to start.
“Shagbark Hickory,” “Hop-Hornbeam,” and “Common Buckthorn,” all sound like the names middle earth kids give their high school garage bands.
😂😂😂… and now my brain just created Ent Metal as a genre. It’s pretty damn Larghissimo, but very strong.
what a fuckin’ nerd.
Okay now I want to figure out what ent metal would sound like.
I’m thinking thunder and whale song. Somehow.
The amount of notes this has gotten is absurd. That doesn’t happen to my posts, but since you crazy kids seem interested here’s (one of a gajillion ways) to make the accompanying primitive arrows.
We want lighter wood than we used to make the bows. This is white cedar- nice and light and sproingy.
Mill that up into rectangular pieces as long as your arrows need to be.
Then you use this homemade tool called a shooting board to rest them in while you hand plane them from rectangular to round.
You saved your wings from the spring turkey hunt, right? Good, we’re gonna need those primary feathers.
Make yourself a pattern out brass or copper sheet, clamp the feather to it, and burn it with a torch. This will shape the feathers into fletchings.
Now we need to make pine pitch glue by melting together pine pitch (you can pick it off pine trees where they’ve been injured) and hardwood charcoal. Think of it as ancient people’s super glue.
Get your paleontologist buddy to give you some rock from actual Paleolithic quarry sites ‘cuz that’s pretty rad.
Learn flint knapping… he said casually after years of hair-pulling-out struggles with it.
Attach your stone points to your arrow shafts using the ancient super glue stuff and leg sinew from the deer you got last year. Do the same for the fletchings.
And you’re finally ready to start practicing! Don’t worry, the dog will help again by standing directly in front of the target because she’s beautiful and loving, but not very good at critical thinking sometimes.
mansies, this post keeps getting more awesome. 🙂
also, proposal: should Caradhras have a different name in summertime? i’m feelin’ a more Bag End or Hobbiton vibe when the place isn’t covered in show.
You can’t go changing place names seasonally, @danipup What would the maps look like? Every place has 4 names?😂😂
From up the thread- I’m glad all these Old Romantics are into Ent Music.
@systlin this seems like it would be right up your.. archery lane?
Holy shit
You can also do a bath and bend version where you use straight pieces of wood instead of carving them, soak the wood in salted water, set to dry using clamps to shape it; repeat the bath soak then clamp set (moving the clamps for each new set) until your bow is in the preferred shape.
(This is how my uncle taught me to make long bows in his workshop at Howitzer when I was a child. They made a lot of fiberglass bows, which I was too young to be around the manufacturing of, and mostly made compound bows (the ones with pulleys that give more tension to the pull). My uncle designed the Warthog bow for himself and other short people who like to now hunt. OP has a couple of clever life hacks to my uncle’s method (using lifting weights is a genius idea), and an excellent bow making method. I am only sharing a different technique for those who may find soaking easier than steaming (or those who find themselves needing to make a bow in the wild since you could bind the wood around a tree instead of clamping it to shape).
