Horn Bow, Warbow, 3D Shoot

I've had the horn bow to a low brace using a peg board to get the limbs back, but before getting it fully braced I've done some sinew work on the it, filing the edges to tidy up some loose sinew or sinew that was wrapped around onto the horn belly. I've added more sinew where it looked a bit thin or dry, this needs plenty of time to dry thoroughly, although the hide glue actually gels and becomes touch dry pretty quickly.
While I've been waiting for this to cure I've been doing some work on a warbow belonging to my mate JT, he's not had it very long and never been happy with it. "..sold to me as a 130#....had less than 100 arrows through it. Just a horrible square (in the hand), uncomfortable thing to shoot! " I had an initial appraisal on the tiller and then set to work, it was a bit long at about 82" nock to nock with rather cumbersome nocks so I sawed them off, loosing about an inch off each end. I thought it might be interesting to saw a long section through the nocks to see how they were fitted... the result was horrible.

The pic shows one of mine (from a 50-60# bow) for comparison.

The Warbow has been strapped down straight and heat treated ready for some re-tillering.
I've done videos of both the horn bow and the warbow refurb on my youtube channel. (Del Cat)

The weather has gone from heatwave to persistent rain an thunder, luckily it held off for my first 3D shoot since the Covid lockdown at the Cloth of Gold club. It was an interesting format "kills only"

which gave a score of 10 for a kill, but minus 2 for a wound! Two arrows on each target, it produces some anomalous results like a small pheasant where I was the the only one from our group of 3 to hit it, but I scored -2. It was good fun and I was with my primitive, the other guys had a longbow and a recurve barebow. It was interesting to compare styles on some of the trickier stances. I was much more at ease with the kneeling shots.
Thanks to all at CoG for a wonderful shoot.
The torrential rain returned on my way home and more the next day, when in the evening I noticed some water on the floor of the sun lounge... so it was up onto the flat roof clearing all the gutters and accumulated buck from the roof, hopefully that will prevent a recurrence. I couldn't see any actual problem and my guess is that the muck accumulated behind and under my solar hot water pipework had allowed water to rise over the flashing or to find a seam in the flashing/upstand against the wall. Time will tell.

Long String On the Tiller

I'm making a 110# warbow from Austrian Yew that I've had waiting for my attention for some months. It's a tricky stave with reflex at one tip and deflex half way along the other.
On one of the Facebook groups there has been someone having trouble tillering a warbow so I thought I'd take regular pictures (captured from video) to help show the progress.
I also wanted to test an observation from one of the hugely respected guys on Primitive Archer (Steve Gardner aka Badger), which is:-

If you have a "long string" that will just slip onto the bow and only dangle down 6" you can read off draw weight and length from that and it will closely tally to the draw weight and length when braced.

It's too easy to take everything one is told as fact, that would be fine if everyone was reliable, the problem is there are a lot of well meaning armchair experts out there. Of course Steve isn't in that category, but seeing is believing, so I did the test.

The top pic shows the stave with no force on it in the upper image, each subsequent image is at 110# on the string that dangles 6".
The final seperate image is with it at a 5" brace pulled to 110#.

It's an absolute pig to get the bow strung and I was having to winch it back to a full 110# on a very long string to give me room to get it braced, and that's where the confusion can lie as the very long string comes back a huge distance because it is dangling down a foot or so.

Right, so in the composite picture, the lowest image shows it at 110# at 24".
I braced it (slightly low about 5") and with some trepidation pulled it back gradually increasing the weight (video running of course)...
At 110# it came back just under 25" which is pretty damn close and very useful.


The moral of the story is:-
1. Make sure you long string only dangles 6"
2. We are all still learning!

There is a slight caveat here, when you have it braced, don't just heave it back to full weight if the tiller isn't good, as the bow will be flexing a bit more than it was on the long string. If you study the pics, you'll see the tips are coming back about an extra inch.
You'll also see that as it's coming back 25" I only have 5 more inches to get the tiller sorted!
That's the rub with a warbow, by the time it's braced you're almost there!
The final pic showing drawn and unstrung together helps to show how it's bending and where I need to take off a little wood. The deflex area middle of the right limb isn't bending enough and the entire right limb is a bits tiff.