Staves & Splicing Jig Explained

I got the jig for doing 4 point splices made and working. It took a good deal of fiddling and fettling to get it right.

Also been making up some decent crossbow bolts with a view to trying the crossbow on Sunday, although it may well be too cold.

My mate JT has been over and we've been trying to lay out a warbow in a very iffy Austrian Yew stave. we are making some progress after a couple of sessions and a good deal of steam bending and untwisting... mind steam work is quite welcomed on a cold day. I've also sorted through some of my staves and found a nice pair of clean heartwood staves which may make Boo backed flight bows or warbows.

Explain More!
I'm assuming more detail is required on the footing jig, so here you go (extract from an article I've written for Field Archery News online magazine.
The Footing Jig :- I’d been intrigued by 4 point footed arrows for some time and some searching the web found some videos showing how it’s done with an expensive jig. “I can make one of those” I thought and promptly set to. Well, like a lot of things it’s easy in theory, but the devil is in the detail. I used a couple of offcuts of Ash plank and routed in two grooves to clamp the arrow at an angle which was guess work. The first mistake was I made two right handed pieces… I’m sure we’ve all made that mistake! I sorted that and clamped the two parts together with a bit of shaft in the groove to hold it aligned. This allowed me to drill holes for steel alignment pins and a bit of threaded rod for clamping. Once that was done I could square up the faces on the belt sander. For the first try, I guided the jig (with shaft clamped into it) along the table of my mill, with the router bit in the mill rotating at full speed above it and set to take a shallow cut (a pillar drill or router would do the job). I guided the jig against a length of suitable timber to keep it running true, but the router bit cut a rather flat bottomed groove and tended to tear, so I had to carefully grind its tip to a better point. The groove cut along the shaft at rather a steep angle which would give a very short splice so I had to make adjustments by sanding the bottom of the jig to change the angle, of course this gave a splice that was too long! Once it was cutting at a reasonable angle, I could cut the groove depth to just short of centre on the shaft. The shaft was then rotated 90 degrees and another groove cut… this is repeated twice more such that the end of the shaft looks like a cross, which gradually tapers out to nothing, this is the male part. The other half of the splice is much easier. I squared off a scrap of Yew on the bandsaw, and then cut two slots along it, so that looking at the end the slots formed a cross, the female part. The two parts push together nicely, the pics are of the first rough try out just to prove it works. When doing it seriously and gluing the parts one should clamp the female part at the base of the saw cuts to prevent splitting along the shaft. Overall it’s a lot of fiddling about