Primitive Archer

Quote from: Robert Pougnier on November 22, 2025, 02:44:25 pm

Here are some photos of a couple of woven quivers.

The first is made of umbrella sedge (papyrus sp.) harvested in south carolina. 25 inches long by 3.5 inches in diameter. Stiffened with a length of meadowsweet. Comfortably holds a dozen arrows.

The second is made of black ash harvested in vermont. The weavers were split in half which make them pretty smooth.  24" by 4 an 1/4. Holds 18+ arrows.

That's just beautiful in the way something very simple and plain can be. I'd love to sit down with you over a weekend and make a few with you just for the experience!

That would be awesome, I rarely get to make things with other folks! Depending on the materials used they can be very time consuming. They can also be done a lot nicer than these two were.

Full length toasting but not like putting the bow over a fire pit, I refine the tiller after toasting.

I darkened out the lighter spots after I took the picture, after the final tiller some of the darker areas only showed a hint of toasting.

I had so much osage back when I was making bows (still do, I live in osage country) that I didn't worry abut ruining a stave which I never did by toasting a sluggish bow.

Nice job, I see no reason that won't work as long as you keep it from bending in the handle. Nice approach.
 Pappy

A cut-in window has no effect on the optimal spine of the arrow. You can verify this with a bare-shaft test if you don’t believe it. However, the cut-in window does make arrows less sensitive to spine variation. With a cut-in window, tuning and shooting become easier because the arrows are less affected by spine variation, release inconsistencies, or other tuning issues. The wider the handle, the more sensitive everything becomes.

My point is that if the optimal static spine is, for example, 42#, it remains the same regardless of the handle width. But with a wide-handle bow, a 44# bare-shaft arrow may fly to the left (for a right-handed shooter), while with a cut-in window the same arrow may still fly straight.

Regarding the “correct” spine, it’s more of a statistical issue. I can shoot accurately with normal, fletched arrows even when the spine variation within the set is 10–15#. But arrows that don’t have the optimal spine will occasionally fly farther left or right. Over the long term, statistically, the arrows with the correct spine will land in the center most consistently. Again, it comes down to sensitivity to various factors (spine, bow, archer, etc.).