Quote: (05-02-2018 12:57 PM)flanders Wrote:
To JohnGalt 007^^
Just find a home depot or lowes and sort through their pile of 1x2" red oak boards, make a few terrible bows with a nylon tillering string and worry about fancy stuff later. Wear safety glasses because sometimes bow limbs explode.
You can in theory make a bow in eight or ten hours (or less) if you know what you're doing but the trial-and-error portion will take a few months and a fair amount of wasted lumber. I knew a guy who was highly skilled at woodworking and even his first few bows were terrible, because tillering is a more dynamic process than cabinetmaking.
From an engineering perspective, any bow you take in the field for hunting should be overbuilt somewhat in order to deal with adverse conditions (extreme cold or damp, or lack of humidity). If you're making an american style longbow, consider making the working part of the limb 2 1/4" wide instead of 2" wide, for instance, to increase the factor of safety in case of extreme cold. Wider limbs are harder to tiller, so if this is a problem, bring a backup.
FYI, a lot of the ancient bows dug out from bogs or swamps or glaciers were fairly ugly pieces of shit that would have shot poorly (hand shock) or had weirdly light or improbably heavy draw weights. Most of the bows the native americans used were also terrible, but they didn't need great archery equipment. Modern man needs better archery equipment because we can't creep to within striking distance of a stag and kill it with a spear. Game nowadays spook easily and we're just not as good at hunting either.
Very good advice. Really, since you Americans have these big box stores that sell boards, it would be shame not to take that opportunity. Hell, my first bows were from character saplings, instead of boards, and thus I had a much higher difficulty learning tillering, but good side is that I got the idea of tillering character bows much quicker than people making first bows just from boards.
What you said about woodworker friend of yours is the same as the case of my father's friend. That guy since he has machines, decided to make bow from laminates. He made pretty much everything good, except he didn't really understood much about mechanics of bow and design. His bow was underpowered and/or even broken later (not sure though).
I think the best advice I could give to any novice bowyer is to go for boards and join archery forum such as paleo planet and primitive archer. Loads of professionals there, very willing to help, no matter how much someone asks same questions (and opens threads for them) each time.
Btw, regarding natives, my favorite is Eastern Woodlands type of bow. I will be making Cherokee black locust warbow very soon.