Main Discussion Area > English Warbow

Medieval Fletching

<< < (7/12) > >>

nathan elliot:
Yewboy, this is fascinating stuff. You have to get it all down in a book, personal quests can often become lucrative ventures.

Nat

Phil Rees:
Yewboy
Sounds as if your in a very privaliged position, do you have any plans to publish your research?

Yewboy:
Well I have never thought of writing a book, however I may get round to it at some stage, but at the moment I have not completed my research, so no book untill I am absolutely sure that I have got it right.
Thanks for the thought though.
I am at present trying to recreate a natural string from hemp that will stand up to the stresses that a 150lb+ bow will put on it, I know linen works reasonably well but I feel that hemp may be stronger, if only I can work out what the glue was. So far I have raw hemp which has been spun into a thread, this is quite strong but not strong enough, I know that a pine resin glue was used to bind the fibres together but then this makes the string quite hard and not very flexible, I also know some form of natural vegetable oil was used to enable the glued string to be flexible but I have to find a natural oil that was available in England and at the correct period, The Japanease used natane oil mixed with pine resin in their hemp Yumi bow strings but this was not available in England, Rape seed oil can be used but again not available during the time period I am looking at, Natane (rapeseed) is a Brassica, so I am trying different Brassica plants and trying to extract the oil from them to make the glue.
So as you can see there is no point in me publishing anything untill I have answers for all aspect of the bow and arrows.
I have very accurate replicas of the bows made from Italian Yew, I have accurate replica arrows, but no string yet.
I will keep you all up to date with my findings if you are interested, but I will not get into time wasting arguments about my research, if someone feels they know better then please don't tell me I'm wrong unless you have physical evidense and can prove what you are saying.

Phil Rees:
Sounds fascinating Yewboy, strings are certainly the missing piece of the jigsaw. There are, as you proberbly know, fragments of tar covered rope  recovered from the Mary Rose, do you think  they could hold a clue to the construction of the bows strings?

Yewboy:
Thanks for that Horace, yes but all these tar covered fragments of rope can help with is rope construction and not the glues used as these were probably fragments of the anti boarding nets that covered the decks and also helped to trap the crew when she went down, I'm sure the tar would negate the need for another glue type, however it is worth investigating, I believe recently a small fragment of what could be a bow string has been found and is now being tested by the MR Trust but I am not privvy to that info at present and probably will not be untill the MR has done their research, but here's hoping.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page