Monday 18 October 2010

Busy weekend

I've finished off the Yew yeoman's bow, plain and simple no horn nocks, no arrow plate, 52 pounds at 28", but it can come back well beyond that. The slight S shape in the bow still shows at full draw and there is a nice bit of character to it. I marked the arrow pass with a simple split circle which sort of represents a C and a D for Del the Cat (my nom de plume on the archery websites).
I bought a heatgun to experiment on the Ash Meare Heath bow which went skew whiff on me. It's digitally adjustable to give decent control (£30 from Screwfix). I clamped the weak limb flat to a piece of 2x2 and started heating it at 200 degrees C, it didn't do much and I slowly increased the heat, I found I could toast it to a light golden brown at 350-400C. My previous failed attempts at heat treating had been too hot too fast.

I left the bow for a day while I went to an NFAS open shoot at Avalon Archers in Bedfordshire.
A great day out, up hill and down dale in the woods, a beautiful setting and a really well organised shoot. There were some great longshots down hill through the trees which I missed, (tricky with the soft trajectory of the 40 pound Hazel primitive bow I was using).
My best shot was a first arrow inner kill on a Bobcat at about 30yards...
There were all sorts of bows there, there were a few other primitives there, plenty of longbows and recurves. I hadn't seen compounds shoot before, not my thing, but they were very impressive, so fast you could barely see the arrow go.

Today I've unclamped Ash bow, the limb is now dead straight and decidedly stiffer than the untreated limb. I shall now do the other limb and see how it stands up to the tiller.
It looks very promising.

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