It's that time of year when a bowyers fancy turns to flight bows.
Some organisations allow bamboo backing on an English Longbow and some don't, I have plenty of Bamboo but I don't have any really good Ash for a backing.
The
Ash backed flight bow from last year was smashed on a test rig last year without ever being shot at a real full draw, so this time I'll allow a slightly bigger margin of error (other people's error, you understand!).
I phoned up an old friend who runs
Celtic Harmony . Many years ago Chris Boyton had felled some Ash there and used some of the timber in a bow making course. I'd had a couple of the left over quarter logs at the time and wondered if there was any still there. They'd all had been stored in a shelter (3 sides and a roof).
I made contact by E-mail and phone and was invited over to collect anything good that was left. I was impressed to see the centre had more round houses and a new heritage centre was almost finished, there were 3 coachloads of schoolkids obviously enjoying themselves despite the heavy drizzle.
I was asked if I had an old bow which could go in the Heritage centre, and recalled just the thing, a longbow made from
churchyard Yew, full of character but with some repairs and splits which made it too unsafe to shoot. I took the bow round to him in the afternoon and I also put a tenner in the donations box.
I ended up with one really nice quarter log a couple of smaller scruffy ones and some partly roughed out light longbow staves. The longbow staves are handy as I can give them to newbie bowyers to learn with rather than jumping straight in on a valuable Yew stave.
The Ash looked really scruffy, but once I'd run the drawknife over it good clean wood was exposed.
I've been cleaning up the faces of the quarter log using Axe, drawknife and plane) so that I can examine the grain and decide the best way to cut the backing strips for maximum yield and an minimum waggle in the grain. It's interesting cleaning it off as the various splinters and tears pull out giving an idea of how deep they run, how they follow the grain and how long they run. I'll be cutting the backing strips with the grain running edgeways thus ||||||||||||||| rather than following a ring. In light of my observations I'll make the backing a little thicker than last year.
Like many jobs, the devil is in the preparation. Running a 7' log accurately through a bandsaw on your own isn't an easy job. Finding an assistant who knows what they are doing and is psychic isn't easy either! I know from experience it's best to keep your wood full length as it's easy to get some run out on the sawing at one end or t'other.
Cleaning the log to give relatively flat faces will allow it to be guided through the bandsaw smoothly.
It's interesting to note that the rings are very tight near the outside of the log and much wider near the centre. I may even consider taking two narrow strips of the tight grain and gluing them together to make a wide backing strip of the tight grained timber.
I've got the first slat sawn, pic left, shows the set up with my adjustable guide.
The rest has been cut now, yielding 5 slats plus two half width ones with tight grain that could be glued together. One of the other staves looks to have good clean straight grain too. That should keep me going for a while. The rest is stashed up on my shelves... a good days work (spread over 2 days).
I've got the bow finished, it's a whisker over 80# at 28" and I'm nearly able to get it back to full draw... a little practice every day and I'll get there... when I do I'll post some video.
Meanwhile I have a 2D rabbit on the target boss (at 10 yards) and my son and I are having 3 arrows each every now and then and scoring them like an NFAS big game round (but scoring all 3 arrows) we can then plot graphs etc and see our progress or lack of it over the days.
