Pitt Rivers Bamboo pellet bow

[jameswoodmot]

Went to the Pitt Rivers museum yesterday for the second time to look at the bows. Unfortunately it’s one of the worst museums for being able to take photos as the cabinets are crammed and the lighting low.

There are some wonderful bows from many cultures including American, African, north  and south east Asia, Korea, Tibetans and Siberia. There’s a particularly nice yew sinew backed Siberian bow that I’m going to make a copy of one day.

There’s also a load of pellet bows from south east Asia and there was one particular one from Thailand that I thought was cute. Very much a toy but I had to make one.

Here’s a video I took to help me reproduce it

https://youtube.com/shorts/Vnth6dilGqE?si=PjZKsp3NJrNO07ns

It turned out to be the exact length of the off cut from a backing I made. It’s the bottom end of the pole so there are more nodes than I’d like and another couple mm thickness in the middle would have been good.

The string is a piece of split bamboo which was the biggest challenge. String and knots are not my forte and whipping the ends too as long as making the bow.

I tried using natural linen twine but I found it was so slippery it just would t stay tight so I ended up parting some sisal and retwining to make the thicker string and the whipping. The linen string broke first shot but that was kinda expected as it was just too thin.

Only one tool to make this bow and it’s my Thai e-nep knife.

I wanted to make the ”string” from the same piece of bamboo but  to split it down that small you have to keep halving the piece and I just wanted a sliver off the edge so I bandsawed it. Grain is good enough to be able to do this

[jameswoodmot]

I did the pouch a little differently. My clay balls are a bit smaller so I made it narrower and Im not sure about the complicated binding on the original.

There’s a bamboo rod between the two halves of the string to keep it apart and then there’s bringing between the two halves to keep it tight on the rod.

Getting the string length right was a pain as you can’t just twist the string. Next one I make I’ll do the string ends differently.

[jameswoodmot]

The birch bark backed bows are the Siberian and Tibetan ones. You can see some pretty cool cable backed Inuit bows and there’s apache and plains bows in there too.

Most of what I took were videos as it’s the only way to get past the replications.