Saturday 3 October 2015

Bits and Bobs

I've picked up a cold so I'm just doing little bits here and there, tidying up the levers on the Molle' and sorting out my arrows.

I was down to my last arrows, but I'd ordered more shafts and fletchings. I ordered 18 rather than the usual dozen. The worst ones have been sorted out and two used up as bolts for the Chinese Repeating crossbow (which was down to the last 4 bolts). I can get have been 3 bolts from a shaft so it's very cost effective.
Two more have been used to splice new ends onto broken arrows which has re-furbished four of 'em, so the arrow supply is looking a bit better now. They are standing up somewhere warm for the glue to dry in the top pic ready to be cut to length and have the points put on later.

I'm toying with the idea of some careful heat straightening of the Molle' limbs. If I can get the heat gun positioned so the temperature stays just over 100C and doesn't get too hot it may be worth doing, but I have to ask myself would I rather a bit of set and a nice character bow or a bag of kindling?
I think maybe I should find something else to fiddle around with, perhaps I should bottle up some more of my plum wine, maybe a medicinal glass would help the cold!


The Molle' is looking pretty good now, I've been over the back with wire wools and white spirit to clean it up. The grip has been shaped a bit, I'm trying to get it comfortable for a left hand but not over sculptured like a modern recurve, after all it's supposed to be primitive, it's a fine line to tread.

The bow is nicely quirky with the levers lying dead in line with the string, but the limbs angle slightly biased to suit the left hand... hang on I'll take a pic.
The pic shows it suspended from the string supported just below the nocking point, it is viewed as if being held.
I'm slowly getting better at shooting left handed now, it's actually better for my stiff neck although I dunno how my vision will cope. My left eye is well out of line having had some nasty infections in both orbit and ethmoid sinus both of which needed minor surgery...  My right eye is my master eye but they both get used of course especially for distance estimation. Anyhow, that's just my excuse for being a mediocre shot (I've a million other excuses of course....)

Update:-
I had another think about straightening the limbs and opted for using steam on the middle section of the upper limb. The great advantage of steam is that it doesn't get too hot. It looks to have been a great success and I'll repeat the exercise on the other limb. Of course the set may reappear, but my theory is that the set was introduced early in the build before the tiller was right, hopefully now the tiller is much improved the stress on the limbs is better distributed and the set may not be quite so bad. I'll tease it back towards full draw keeping an eye on the tiller and adjusting where necessary.
I took some video of the process which I'll edit into an epic tale of sword and sorcery and post on Youtube here:- https://youtu.be/aCuXa95ffYI

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