How to Make a Longbow | Hacker News Reader

How to Make a Longbow

howtomakealongbow.co.uk

144 pointsnbernard41 comments

Shooting barebow recurve / horsebow is one of the most zen-like experiences I've had. And it's a workout!

I would encourage anyone remotely interested to take lessons before you start practicing on your own to prevent bad habits or to prevent from hurting your fingers/hands/shoulders. Trainers should have light-weight bows, around 16# or so for you to try. Etsy is a good place to buy accessories (tabs, quivers, gloves, rings, etc.).

I've bought arrows/bows from these folks and really like what I received:

https://www.szimeiszterbows.hu/

https://asianbows.com/

And for less expensive carbon arrows, I have a few different sets from https://linkboyarchery.com/. Really good stuff.

Lancasterarchery.com is a US-based outfit that has a variety of good equipment.

Shooting a bow and riding a horse are difficult enough activities on their own. I can't imagine how hard it must be to be able to competently shoot a bow from a fast moving horse.

Don't forget elbow lashes, those are brutal.

25 years ago, I had a Honduran roommate who barely spoke English. One day he came home with a thrift store VHS on how to make longbows and he watched that thing over and over like it would tell him the meaning of life. I hope he finally got ahold of some yew wood and made one.

I mean, I've certainly watched Adam Savage and other youtuber's build random stuff on a lazy sunday morning, or as a background to getting some housecleaning or work done, or while I'm working on building my own random thing.

I find it pretty gratifying and I'm not even going into those videos to learn what they are specifically doing most of the time, but still often I'll pick up a technique or two.

My selfbow staves (four of them in case I fuck them up or want to try again) are currently in my friends garage over by the furnace drying, it's kinda the biggest bummer to making your own bow step 2 (1. Acquire a stave 2. Wait for it to dry (for many months probably)).

I've made a self-bow (ie a longbow from a single piece of wood) - under instruction it took a couple of days with some simple, but very sharp, tools.

If you're going the laminate route do yourself a favour and buy some pre-laminated wood designed for the pressures a bow needs to take. The results of laminate cracking and splintering near your eye don't really bear thinking about.

Also, never dry fire your bow. (i.e. Never pull and release it if you're not shooting an arrow.)

When you pull a bow, you're putting a significant amount of potential energy into it. Your back and arms do work that becomes tension in the limbs of the bow. When you fire an arrow, most of that energy goes into propelling the arrow down range. The bow is designed to do this. If there is no arrow, that energy has to go somewhere. Typically, it goes into vibrations that the bow is not designed to handle. This can cause delamination, cracks or even catastrophic failure in your face.

Just because a bow survives one dry fire doesn't mean it'll survive two or three or more. A bow that has been dry fired is not safe to use and needs to be checked out.

When I was a kid, I made a bow using the instructions from Two Little Savages by Ernest Thompson Seton [1]. It was fun making it, but I didn't actually learn to use it properly.

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/13499/13499-h/13499-h.htm#2I...

Shout out to Archery GB - https://archerygb.org/ - because if you're going to be firing arrows, you really really should know how to do it safely. Bows are not toys.

And for the US - USA Archery https://www.usarchery.org/

40-plus years ago, I would take my dads bow and arrows, stand in the front yard, and shoot arrows straight up in the air. Not too high up, but high enough for me to toss the bow aside and catch the arrow in my hands when it came back down. Good times. Stupid, but good times.

Lawn Darts++

Dad didn't stop you, eh?

It was the 80s.

Meanwhile, far away, in the vast and remote reaches of Russia, in a modest workshop beside a weathered small house, an old man patiently teaches his small grandson the art of assembling a Kalashnikov.

It really is an art compared to more modern options, mostly due to trying to replicate what a skilled operator at stamped metal factory at the time was capable of at a small scale. That and the press fit barrel and gas block are much trickier than just torquing a barrel nut to the right amount of ft/lbs. like with the AR platform.

Enthusiasts will pay eyebrow raising amounts for custom ones from a shop with an impressive reputation for something that was the height of 1950s technology.

Meanwhile in India a small family workshop manufactures new Kalashnikov's by hand for export ...

Elaborate please.

Cool! Part 2 on "gluing laminations" got me to wondering how an ancient/medieval bowyer would have actually glued the layers together, considering they didn't have access to polyvinyl acetate. Wikipedia has some clues at [0]: "Traditionally animal proteins like casein from milk or collagen from animal hides and bones were boiled down to make early glues." and [1]: "A Scythian wood-laminate bow was... constructed by laminating several fine strips of willow and alder wood, bound with fish glue and wrapped in birch bark."

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_glue

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laminated_bow

This kind of animal glues have some nice properties than “white glue” miss, e.g. you can remove it with heat. Traditional woodworkers still use it. You can buy it today: https://www.fine-tools.com/oberfl.html

I use it for most glue-ups. I'm a big fan of Old Brown Glue:

https://oldbrownglue.com/

Great stuff, and the videos they put out are outstanding as well. The one about veneering a column is highly worth watching and illustrates the advantages of an animal protein glue in a real application.

Making various kinds of glues from animal or vegetable sources is one of the oldest human technologies, many tens of thousands of years old.

Even the Neanderthals knew how to make certain kinds of glue, which were used for instance for attaching spear-points to spears.

Similarly, glue and woven fabric layers make excellent composite armor.

If this is submitted by the person who made the page:

There should be clear links to the class and how to sign up. I know this isn't a marketing page, but there's plenty of people who would gladly pay money to do this supervised. This seems like an ideal father-son activity with a teenager for summer break.

If you want to make a bow, the Tradition Bowyer's Bible is a fantastic resource.

In my family boys are taught this at about 8. This makes me want to do it again. I had my grandfathers bow stolen out of the trunk of my car and haven’t nooked an arrow in a long time.

I went down to the local hardware store and bought a laminted bamboo broomstick.

Less than an hour shaping with a plane and a knife used as a scraper I had a pretty good longbow.

Seemed that laminated bamboo is fairly forgiving, and capable of some serious deflection making a powerful bow.

Next, a crossbow, though I am wary of that much stored energy with a trivial trigger.

Steve Boss, an artist and craftsman at the Portland Art Market, sold me an American Flatbow several years ago. He also handmade, fletched and tested the arrows himself. I wish I could refer to his website but I don't think he has an online presence outside of a personal Facebook page.

Although I've only shot the bow a handful of times, it's always been a really fulfilling experience.

There is an out of print book from the 50's that's a great resource for bow making.

The full title is, "The Archer's Craft; a Sheaf of Notes on Certain Matters Concerning Archers and Archery, the making of archers' Tackle and the Art of Hunting with the Bow" and the author is Adrian Eliot Hodgkin.

There are a fair number of them --- one of my favourites was Hunt's _The FlatBow_:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3977436-the-flat-bow

(having read a number of his other books)

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/paleoplanet69529/decurve-ref...

Waiting for "how to use a longbow" and "how to not kill anyone with a longbow".

Grape Brick style: "It is of the utmost importance that you do not do the following with your longbow. Lest you maximize its lethality, please take care to avoid carrying out these specific instructions with your new purely decorative longbow. At all times, ensure that the bow is never fired in the direction of the vital points outlined on the anatomical chart (FIG. 1)"

Just yesterday I randomly stumbled across this very interesting clip on youtube about longbow crafting in Japan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPKts3cHvv8

I made a self-bow in a class and will need to make another one. If you think you'd like to make a bow and you have the opportunity to learn from someone, jump on it.

Finally - something I can actually use.

I've been thinking lately "I wonder how to make a longbow?" and here it is.

All I can think of is: "Poor Boromir." :-(

i wonder why this tiny website costs a lot per month. wouldnt it fit np on a free tier of Pages or Cloudflare. Id volunteer to migrate it from wordpress or whatever they run on.

My guess is that he wants to be compensated for the time he spent. There's a lot of content on that site, and making a bit of money is a good motivation to keep updating the site

This was my first thought as well. I wonder if he hired someone to build it and is paying some kind of monthly maintenance fee. Anyone here could contact this guy and offer to put the page behind a (probably ~free) CDN.

The helicopter?

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