Bowstring Again and a Visit.

I'm getting stuff together for a Tudor bowmaking re-enactment and wanted some pukka Flemish twist linen bowstrings. No body could do 'em for me in time (2 weeks) !
So I set to and made one myself, bit of a pain but it didn't take too long once I'd got the loop done. I followed the instructions in the Traditional Bowyers Bible vol2 . It was rather good when done and waxed up, felt sort of snakelike. I tried it on my 68# longbow, it had very little stretch, much better than Dacron and the bowyers knot didn't slip at all, confirming my suspicion that it's slippery modern materials that make bowyers knots slip.

About mid day I had a visit from a lovely couple. The chap, who also makes bows had contacted me, having been following the blog. They were up in this area visiting and he very kindly brought me 2 lovely Elm 1/4 logs about 7' long which had been cut at their home in Devon. Excellent! There's not much Elm about and the last stuff I had was way back when we had that outbreak of Dutch Elm disease (in the late 1960s).
We got on really well, and while us gents were shooting the bows the ladies were enjoying a chat and a cuppa in the garden. The bows all had a good work out including the Chinese repeater. It was nice that the lady joined in and had a go with my crossbow pistol and watched the Chinese repeater as sometimes it's not of much interest. They stayed for a couple of hours, but I got the feeling that if they didn't need to be on their way, we could have opened  a bottle of wine and some pizzas and made a long lazy day of it.

This blog has been great for meeting interesting people and I've made contact with some lovely people, helped people out with materials and had all sorts of materials in return. It's a wonderful give and take which would have been virtually impossible without the internet.

Meanwhile I'm busily trying to research what tools would be historically accurate in Tudor times, the problem is that tools like rasps and files existed but would probably looked less uniform than the machine made modern equivalents... (Note to self:- Remove plastic handles ;) )