Main Discussion Area > Primitive Skills
How would you make a wooden blowgun ?
ekalavya:
"Cheap" tubes made of plastic, copper and other metal are already avaiable ....
I make my bows myself , so why not my blowgun ....
The first idea which came to me was making it like barrels, old wooden buckets and so on ....
splitting the dry branch free sapling into eight parts .... removing the sharp end and glueing
and wrapping the pieces together and thus having a octogonal "tube" ....
however later it came to me : "this might be stupid or impractical" ... because there is no historical
evidence for that ..... so this would be an untraditional way ... but two pieces of wood should
be right
later it came to me again .... maybe the first wood blowgun were burned and smoothened with
tar, pitch or beeswax or what else was avaiable ....
anyway all descriptions i found (i did not find that many) say it is a lot of work and a bow together
with quiver and arrows is less work , weighs less and requires less wood
i am also not sure if a blowgun really requires good quality hardwood or if the wood does not
need to have the same qualities as bow wood
also there is no "Traditional Blowgun Bible" ... so things for blowguns are different
And this is exactly why I am asking you there , because people who build wooden blowguns
on the northern hemisphere exists and they have experience
TrevorM:
I'd imagine bamboo would be the thing to use
Pat B:
I just Googled "Cherokee Blowguns"
mullet:
Large River cane is the way to go. I've seen it split length ways, cleaned out and smoothed. Then put back together with hide glue and wrapped with thin rawhide strips.
TrevorM:
If Wikipedia is to be believed they're illegal in CA, MA and DC which surprised me...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowgun
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