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Alternative ways of putting horn bows together
HanibalLecter(InnerSmile):
I would like to start a discussion about alternative ways to put horn bows together. The typical method of getting all the components together is to use animal glue. But animal glue, for all its strengths, is notoriously finnicky to make and use. It's more of an art than a concrete method, it takes a while to master, is time consuming to make, and even experts can easily screw up in more ways than one.
For example, I have not seen any discussion in the bowyering community about the medieval horn bows which used nails (more like tacks) to affix the horn plates to the wooden core. Has anyone here made one of these? If not, someone ought to! This gets around the animal glue issue for the horn-wood surfaces. However, it would probably be considerably heavier than glue. These would probably not make good flight bows, but were issued to cavalry for war.
Sometimes I have wondered if low-stress hornbow designs ( like those with deflexed limbs) even need to have the horn/core surfaces glued. A glued-sinew wrapping ought to be sufficient? Obviously you still have to use glue for the sinew, unless you use a cable backing.
bownarra:
Collagen glues are not difficult to use. Just the same as any glue - follow the 'instructions'....if you don't....good luck!
If you have the skills necessary to make a hornbow you could quite easily learn how to use collagen based glues. If on the other hand you can't use collagen based glues....you should probably forget about making hornbows :)
The correct use of the glue is not the hard part :)
IF there was another viable method it would be in common use.
You aren't an expert if "you screw up easily" you may think you are but you aren't ;) An 'expert' has already made the mistakes and won't do so again :)
HanibalLecter(InnerSmile):
--- Quote from: bownarra on May 16, 2021, 03:18:56 am ---Collagen glues are not difficult to use. Just the same as any glue - follow the 'instructions'....if you don't....good luck!
If you have the skills necessary to make a hornbow you could quite easily learn how to use collagen based glues. If on the other hand you can't use collagen based glues....you should probably forget about making hornbows :)
The correct use of the glue is not the hard part :)
IF there was another viable method it would be in common use.
You aren't an expert if "you screw up easily" you may think you are but you aren't ;) An 'expert' has already made the mistakes and won't do so again :)
--- End quote ---
Strongly disagree, bownarra. The world had largely stopped making horn bows in the 1700s, so more knowledge has probably been lost than gained since the re-advent of horn bowyering that took place in the late 1900s. What we know today is just a small part ot the past that we have managed to re-interpret and re-construct. You better believe there are other methods of doing this. We just haven't figured them out, yet.
There were other ways of doing things in the past. Take wheels, for example, like on a wagon or a chariot. Everybody knows that wheels have spokes, and those spokes have to be be driven in to the hub, and that involves doing a lot of banging on a chisel, right?
Well, not for dynastic Egyptian chariot wheels. Their spokes consisted of pieces of wood that had been bent in to a V-shape that were glued and bound to the hub with catgut.
https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/courses/fightingpharaohs10/9985.html
It's something that people wouln't have imagined -- until they found them. "There's no other viable way, or it'd exist by now", they'd say. And yet ways did exist in the past for making wheels, which had been entirely forgotten by humanity for thousands of years, until we found this stuff, examined it, and re-constructed it.
There's no doubt in my mind there were, or can be, other ways of putting hornbows together.
HanibalLecter(InnerSmile):
OK guys, before I go to bed, I want to share some quotes from an article I read about Native American horn bows. I highlighted the controversial parts myself.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25667604.pdf
--- Quote ---Mountain sheep horn bows are mentioned
in a number of contexts dealing with
Shoshonean cultural groups and their super
ior quality over other types is always noted
(see e.g., Wilson-Driggs 1919:107; Dominick
1964:155-156; Lowie 1924:246) and Grinnell
(1972:174-175) describes horn bows among
the Cheyenne. Three of these accounts offer
some insight into their manufacture.
"These bows were made from the thick ridge on the upper side of the ram's horn. The horn was heated over the coals to soften it and then the naturally curling horn was straightened. Unwanted portions of the horn were whittled away, and the remaining solid piece was 18 to 24 inches long and one inch thick at the butt. Heat was again applied, making the horn semi-plastic, and it was smoothed and shaped by pounding with a round stone.
The end result was a very smooth and evenly tapered piece which was oval-shaped in cross section. A duplicate of this was made from the ram's other horn, and the two pieces were beveled at their butt ends and fitted together. A separate piece of horn about five inches long and as wide as the butt ends was placed at their junction. Wet rawhide was then wrapped around the three pieces. When it dried, this made a very firm joint. Sinew strips which came from the neck and back of large animals were glued to the back of the bow to give it added strength. The glue was made by placing shavings from the hoof and small bits of thick neck-skin or back-skin in boiling water, and then as a thick scum formed, it was skimmed off." "It took two months for a skilled specialist to turn out such a bow, and other Shoshoni people and even people of other tribes traded eagerly for them." (Dominick 1964:155-156).
According to Dominick this account of horn bow manufacture was obtained from a Jack Contor who was head of the welfare office in Blackfoot, Idaho and who had made the history and culture of the Northern Shoshone a hobby. Another brief account of Shoshoni horn bow manufacture was by Nick Wilson who spent some time as a boy among Chief Washakie's group:
"The bows were sometimes made of mountain sheep horns, which were thrown into some hot spring and left there until they were pliable. Then they were shaped, and a strip of sinew was stuck on the back with some kind of balsam gum that was about as good as glue. This made a powerful bow. Not many Indians had this kind, most of our Indians used bows made from white cedar strung with sinew along the back." (Wilson-Driggs 1919:107).
The authenticity of the two accounts is difficult to evaluate. Contor apparently obtained his information from informants while Wilson was an actual observer. Some actual experimentation with mountain sheep horn using both direct heat and hot water would undoubtedly yield some valuable data
--- End quote ---
Digital Caveman:
Nailing a bow together is cheap, but it will disrupt the integrity of the lams and will not be so uniform as glue. This means that it would have to be over built. Though if you over built it it would probably work ok.
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