The infection of making wooden archery tackle can launch some folks into reading everything they can find about trees that make good bows or arrows. That leads to seeing potential material in places that wouldn’t have been noticed by a healthy mind. There’s that straight-grained whateverit- is that trims the interior doors at church. That well-aged wainscoting in the sanctuary. And power poles. Lots of them are made of spruce or Douglas fir.

James Duff, in his 1927 text, Bows and Arrows, had a lot to say about wood and seasoning it to make shafts. He said some of the best wood for the purpose he ever came across was cut from timbers salvaged from the demolition of an old building in Scotland. Those timbers might have been hundreds of years old, and the wood as stable as could be imagined. Duff’s account has made me think that every old house and barn I see in my
travels may hold some beautiful straightgrained arrow wood. I have to admit to shamelessly wondering whether the wood in perfectly good and pleasing articles might make good arrows.

The back of an upright piano has often had me wondering about that spruce sound board and mentally passing it across a table saw to cut arrow blanks. The grain in those sound boards is as straight as a ruler and absolutely clear of knots. I like piano music and would have hated to see a fine instrument broken up, even to make arrows. But, as my children having moved away or turned up their noses at a concert career, our 1920s upright piano stood in danger every time I looked at it. It had served its purpose.

I tried to give it away. I really tried! But people had an approach-withdrawal conflict over the idea. Some were salivating over the “free” part but already feeling the aching backs that would result from having to move the dark old beast. Even with my lust for arrow wood, I resisted the thought of harvesting it. But the old monster sat there in the way, rejected and neglected, refusing to leave, die or even fade away. I thought dying elephants were supposed to cart their ivory off to the elephant graveyard, but no.

When the end became inevitable, I enlisted my reversible drill and tried not to think about dirges as I field dressed the carcass. Five or six pounds of screws, nuts, bolts, and two days later, there was neither piano nor forte in the living room. Unfortunately, once removed from its case, the sound board didn’t look so much like a sheet of arrow wood. There were spruce stiffeners at right angles to the grain every few inches across what had been the inner face of the board. The grain ran diagonal to the existing edges (formed by my deft use of a chainsaw accompanied by a leonine roar from the sound board). So I snapped a chalk line parallel to the grain and cut the line with a circular saw. Here was a sour note—the sound board was only a little more than 5/16ths of an inch thick. It would be a close thing to get arrows of that diameter.

After planing the new edge straight, I ran the board through my table saw to rip square strips, each looking like a head-to-tail line of quarter notes, the heads being the attached sections sliced from the stiffeners. Then I ran the strip through the saw again to cut off the stiffener remnants.

Now the blanks could be worked into shafts. I set up my router jig for the small square stock and ran the first blank through. Everything seemed good except there were some mucky-looking blobs irregularly spaced along the shaft. The next few turned out the same. It took me a while to realize the blobs were melted and recongealed varnish. The squares were so close to finished size that the varnish was not being completely removed by the router.

For the rest of the squares, I ran the varnished surfaces across the end of my belt sander to get down to the wood. That cured the problem. I made up 21 shafts and finished 18 that would be enough for several visiting British family members to use in their first opus as archers at Somerset Bowhunters’ 3-D range in Skowhegan, Maine. The shafts turned out to be in the 30 to 35 pound spine range, which would be good for the light bows they would use. Most of the shafts were very nearly straight right out of the rounding setup. The rest straightened easily in hand, as spruce shafts usually do. These shafts had great grain—most with no runout of the rings and a few just one. But the wood seemed soft. It was stringy to cut.

And then there is the sound. If I remember correctly from my college music appreciation class, the Stradivari family, makers of fine stringed instruments, were said to be able to judge the quality of wood by thumping on the tree as it stood in the forest. The shafts I made from the piano have the same tone the instrument had.It would be kind to call it mellow. Dull would be more accurate. Grab a handful of good arrow shafts and the tone of their collisions will be a sharp clicking. These make a more muted sound. Of the shafts I have on hand, the white spruce have the sharpest sound, the cedars next, and these unknown spruce their dulcet tone. I have tested them with a 30 pound bow, and they fly very well. That’s one requirement of a good arrow. I had forgotten how pleasant it is to shoot a light bow with properly matched arrows.

For a second source of shafts, I looked over the heavy vertical frame parts of the piano. They seemed to be Douglas fir. Since the frame pieces were massive, I could cut 3/8- inch squares from them and expect to get a lot of good shafts. I ripped out a few, turned on the router, placed the end of the first piece of square stock in the proper size bushing, and spun the stock with my electric drill. The wood seemed to be cutting nicely for a couple of inches. Then there was an explosion of shattered splinters. The square stock just disintegrated. I thought the disaster might have been the result of the router being set too far from the stock, leaving the rounded shaft too large for the output bushing. So I adjusted the setup and tried again, with the same result.

A third attempt ended the same way, so I tried to break one of the longer pieces of round stock that had survived the crashes. It broke easily in my hands. So did some of the as-yet-untouched square sticks. Douglas fir has a reputation for becoming “brashy” when too dry. This wood made that believable. Of course, I can’t be certain the stock was Douglas fir, though it had the right color and grain pattern. None of the material from the piano had any odor when cut or sanded, except the smell of musty varnish. I assumed the lack of odor in the wood was because of its long life in various living rooms with the seasonal changes in temperature and humidity over the course of eight decades. But maybe what I thought was Douglas fir was hemlock, which would have had no odor.

So the piano yielded some usable shafts and a lot of scrap wood. I will no longer covet the sound boards of pianos. The wood has exceptionally straight grain, but is too thin for any but lightly spend arrows. It’s also way too much work to remove it from its packaging. A last bit of irony, my British kin found themselves shooting arrows from a Norman piano!