Main Discussion Area > English Warbow
How War Bows were manufactured for wars
DarkSoul:
Hm, I've got a "dreadnaught file" blade laying around here. I've never heard of that term before, but after googling it appears to be the same as a car body file, which the thing is called locally. I've not yet used the thing at all, it was stashed somewhere in my bowyery stuff corner. Time to try and get this thing to work this weekend. It's 12" long and looks rather agressive. I'll try the blade itself first. If it seems to work, I might even make a handle for it. The blade feels sharp as is, and might take some skin without a holder for it. The intended adjustable handle looks very good, but is rather expensive. A simple wooden handle for it is probably sufficient and is easily mounted due to the two holes in the blade. Let's test the thing this weekend!
We're going slightly off topic, but okay :p
WillS:
I use mine for roughing out staves, chugging through knots and right through to chasing sapwood rings. With pressure it eats wood for breakfast and yet with a bit of care you can use it for the craziest detail work. I have a tonne of various cabinet rasps, files and so on and just never use them as none are as versatile I don't think.
adb:
I don't think we'll ever know for sure how medieval bowyers made their bows, but it would sure be interesting to time travel and find out! I seriously doubt they did it much differently than we do now, or they knew the final draw weight, or that the bows were overly finished, judging by what I saw at the Mary Rose Museum. But, as Del said, we'll never know for sure.
WillS:
I think you're right, although they were making hundreds of thousands of bows in a fairly short space of time and the bows had to be good enough to pass muster and be war-worthy. You wouldn't send troops into the Middle East today with poor quality firearms, and they wouldn't have issued poor quality warbows back then. While we can take our time and spend a week tillering one bow to a perfect draw weight, fitting beautiful grips and snake-skin accents and sanding it to look like glass and carefully shaping horn nocks and so on, I just can't see that back then. Mass produced quickly but to a very high standard is my guess.
Whether this means highly skilled bowyers working in the same way we do, or whether there were methods used such as fast reduction of staves by one bowyer and rounding/tillering by another or a combination of the two we'll probably never know.
One thing that I'd really love to know is the draw-weight quandary. Did they know draw weights, or was it all just base dimensions and the outcome was the outcome depending on the timber? We'll never know that either. Personally I find it slightly unlikely that the soldiers were trusting their lives to a bow with an unknown draw weight, but without accurate scales and methods of measuring the bows, I can't see how they would have been able to know. Fascinating, either way, and all the more reason these weapons and their history are so exciting!
Badger:
If a bowyer were not held to a specific draw weight but instead an acceptable range I can easily see a bowyer making 2 bows a day with mostly a draw knife. When you are making that many bows you can pretty much finish it without even putting a string on it.
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