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MR replica (pics)

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Davepim:
Kviljo,
     I have a question regarding your sidenocks, seeing as you are one of very few people who get them to work well for you. What knots are you using top and bottom? The close up of one of your nocks suggests that your bowstring has a loop and that this is passed through itself to make a slipknot; am I seeing this correctly? How does it hold and how easy is it to loosen when unstringing?

Cheers, Dave

outcaste:
Hi,

Nicely made bow Kviljo. I am interested in the width profile and fade to the tips as this has a bearing on the overall draw weight of the bow. Interestingly enough I am also constructing an 'approximation' that has the same amount of growth rings as the original (well mine has 65 per inch and the original has 68, I think this is close enough) and is dimensionally correct width/depth. This bow is tillered to 18ins at the moment and is projecting to over 150lbs at 32. The bow is also 4 inches longer than the original! If we assume that arrows on the MR were on average 30ins then your bow would have a draw weight of around 60 odd pounds I guess? Fine I think against unarmoured sailors, but not plate armour. I would be interested in how far your bow would shoot a 60gram arrow with appropriate medieval fletchings though.

Anyway good to see some bows on this part of the forum.

Cheers,
Alistair

Jaro:
Nice bow. Little flat inner limb on the left side, which I  perceive is lower limb on the fulldraw pic.

Kviljo, your argument about Nydam bows being light is nonsequiturial. The question was about "medieval", which 200-300 AD is not, that is late roman/iron age. Anyway, the question asked should probably sound : "Do you think that any bowman will go into battle with a bow underpowered for the task in respect to enemy armour and artilery?" The answer is aparently "No, or he wont live for too long."
Nydam bows in their age of use were aparently sufficient for kiling unarmored or very lightly clad men - and again that is what an experienced craftsperson can easy judge by the construction of arrows and arrowheads. (Which is by the way pretty consistent with the traits of naval combat).(And archeologist can supply the context of the time and material culture.
Im usually first to cry : "caution" whenever I see sensationist post, but I would think that median range of drawweight for MR bows 120-130# can be taken as established fact.
On the other hand we can safely say that bows in the originally perceived range (60#-80#-90#) have not sufficient performance in the context of late medieval and tudor archery.

J.

Jaro:
That said a bow of similar dimensions and profile made out of very coarse park grown (light) yew by my buddy Paja came out at nice 125# and delivers very good distances.
Same yew has strange weight/stiffness ratio.

J.

Kviljo:
Dave, you are interpreting the picture correctly. I use the spliced slipknot loop for the top nock and a reinforced bowyers knot (or a kyodo-knot) on the lower nock. This bow is no problem stringing without a stringer, and it works without any problems. On heavier bows with FF string, the knot on the lower limb tend to slip after some shooting, lowering the braceheight. The spliced selftightening loop on the upper nock seems to tighten quite a bit, although it's not a big problem to loosen it as long as it is used together with a stringer.

Outcaste, this picture shows the width-profile:


~60# @ 30" is a good guess. I've got some 1/2" - 3/8" ash shafts that I will try with it. They won't leave the bow in a hurry, hehe ;D
It is interesting to hear these numbers from replica bows. Is it enlish yew you are working with? It must be pretty dense :)


Jaro, yep, Nydam is from the roman period. But just for the sake of the argument, hehe, it is only 175 years too early to be defined as medieval (if we stretch the space-definition of the start of the medieval period a little). ;) So from the evidence of the Nydam bows, one could easily state that archers in the medieval period went into battle with 60-70# bows... :P - like adb asked :)
Other than that, we agree :)

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