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English longbows can be tough!
SimonUK:
--- Quote ---Personaly I think you need to judge bows used by past societies not against eachother but against the environments and sittuations they were being used in.
--- End quote ---
Exactly. The purpose of the english longbow was to launch a very heavy arrow to punch through armour. To launch such an arrow a respectable distance you need a long draw length, hence the long bow. It's pointless comparing it with a bow designed for sneaking up on a deer.
For many of us, its not just the design of the longbow that makes it attractive, its all the history surrounding it.
gpw:
Apples and oranges... Seems like all tillering is tough... tillering is where you" put the cards on the table".. the single most important part of all bowmaking , especially if you're looking for performance, as we all are ... Traditional D section elb's seem much easier to tiller with the right wood ...good yew... even cedar
Flat bows seem so much less "wood critical"..you can tiller a shovel handle if you're good enough...
I'm sure there was a long apprenticeship for the English bowyer... same old story ...Practice...Practice...Practice
Just for Fun and practice we regularly make 18" -24"test bows of all shapes which shoot nail tipped bamboo skewers (2 fletch) through the chronograph >200fps.. that gets their attention...
Hillbilly:
--- Quote ---D crosssection isnt the same as a D tiller. Trappe Or am I just blowing SMOKE
--- End quote ---
Nope, not blowing smoke. What I refer to as a D-bow is a bow with a D tiller (no relation to D. Tiller with a period after the D-the notorius world-renowned maker and purveyer of fine soaps :) ) Having a D-shaped cross section sets the ELB apart from most other D-bows, which are usually flat or semi-flat bellied designs with the exception of a few round cross-sectioned ones.
duffontap:
Justin,
Steve A. is one of the TBB authors and coauthored the Encyclopedias of Native American bows and arrows with Jim Ham. He also draws most of the illustrations for the work in the Bowyer's Bibles. I used him as an example because he knows what he's talking about and even though he is an ambush hunter, he can use and elb in his blinds and tree stands.
As far as performance goes, a lot of people seem to think that a 45 degree string-angle stack is the only thing you are trying to avoid. A 72" bow stores more energy in ten inches of draw than a 69" bow. I know there are obvious limits to lengthening due to limb mass/string mass etc. With heavy arrows, the performance advantage is nearly always with the longer bow.
Mullet,
I was just reacting to what I perceive to be a general 'Native Americans never made a mistake' attitude.
I still wish to ask short bow advocates how Howard Hill managed to kill anything with a 72" bow if its too long to hunt with. The Thompson brothers hunted Mullet's neck of the woods with bows up to 84".
Good discussion. I hope no one is going to assume that I think the ELB is the only good design. In my reading, I have found that they tend to be treated as markedly inferior to American designs and I do disagree with that.
J. D. Duff
Badger:
JD, I normaly try to avoid using fps numbers here because it has more to do with the shooter sometimes than the bows they are testing, but just speaking for my own bows tested side by side I have gotten the normal hunting weight elbs into the same speed range as the albs, the albs do seem to average out a bit faster but not by that much. The design has to match the wood regardless of the style you are building. Whern building a heavy bow, especially a longer draw heavy bow the design almost begs to be an elb. When using a heavy wood like osage say in the 60# or less class you have to kind of fudge the tiller and leave the center stiff to get any kind of performance out of them most of the time so the alb seems to make more sense for them. A 60" elb style with osage can perform very well even bending through the handle. I don't think there is a best style just a best style for what you are making and what you have to make it with. If you were to make a fiberglass elb say 140# and 80" long that bent through the handle I imagine you could run as fast as the arrow. Steve
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