Devonian's First Attempt at making a Longbow – Picture Heavy

[Devonian]

OK so I decided to have a go at making a traditional English style longbow and this thread will record my first attempt at making one. I have never tried making a bow like this before, and neither have I been on any bow making courses etc. I have however looked at a few things online and watched a few YouTube videos on the subject.

So this could be a complete disaster – time will tell.

First of all the wood being used is Ash (as that is what I had access to!) I selected 3 lengths to bring home and use, though I was fortunate in that the wood used had already been cut down and had been sitting in the woods for about 2 years, so wasn’t green wood. It was then kept in my garage for another 6-8 weeks before I got around to making a start, so was fairly well seasoned. Note – I own the woods, so it wasn’t being stolen from someone else!

I tried to get the straightest and most knot free sections possible – easier said than done!!!



Each length of Ash was approximately 2.4m (approx. 8 foot) long and about 100mm (4”) diameter, as shown in the photo’s below:





I wanted to limit myself to the use of tools I already have, or which could easily be obtained after a SHTF event, so no draw knives! The real intention is that if I need to be able to make a good reliable bow in the future for hunting/survival purposes, then it’s something that I will be able to make and more importantly rely on. It’s easy to simply put some cord on a stick and call it a bow, but will it have enough power and accuracy to help you take say a rabbit or pigeon at a reasonable distance? Of course this is not something I would do at this time, as hunting with bows is illegal!

So the first task was to split the timber, this was done using a lump hammer and an axe. The axe was placed over a small crack in the centre of the timber at approximately mid length. The lump hammer was then used to whack the axe through the timber which started to split the timber along the length of the grain, the axe was then moved along the length of the timber and used as a wedge to as to split and not cut the wood.

Once split in half long ways, the best half was selected and the process was repeated to split the timber in half again to form the raw bow stave.



The next step was to trim the quartered timber/stave to form the roughly rectangular profile/cross section of the bow.

For this I continued with the axe, using it to strip the bark and to trim away the bulk excess wood. Also at this stage it was important to make sure that the stave was correctly trimmed/shaped and aligned with the grain of the wood.





I had a go at using a Parang machete to help trim the wood, but that was absolutely useless and was quickly put aside. However to be honest I was pretty impressed with the way the old Fiskars axe was dealing with the job, holding it next to the head it had no trouble shaving off layer after layer of wood.

So that is the progress after an hour or so last weekend, if people are interested, I will add updates to this thread as and when I find the time (work is pretty busy at the moment) to continue/complete the bow.

[Barneyboy]

that looks like a bloody good first job there keep us posted

[Smiffy]

(24 April 2014, 21:39)Devonian Wrote: So that is the progress after an hour or so last weekend, if people are interested, I will add updates to this thread as and when I find the time (work is pretty busy at the moment) to continue/complete the bow.

Excellent stuff Devonian, definitely interested in updates

[Scythe13]

NICE!

Looking forward to the shoot review.

[Devonian]

Looking forward to the shoot review.

Yep, that will be the true test!!