Primitive Archer

Pappy, I'm glad things are looking up.  Keep moving forward Miss Joanie.  Congrats to the boys.  That's a great looking family Big A.  I sure miss your stories about your Daddy and the sailors.  Good times. 

Fantastic!

I am lazy, I mix one wax toilet seal with a pound of beeswax and call it done, I pour it up in little dixie drinking cups, one batch makes about a lifetime supply and is the best bow string makers wax that I have ever used. I have made over a thousand bow strings and used my homemade wax on every one of them.

So this kinda started as a plan to make a r/d similar to the Ash one I did a couple of months ago to get an idea of the difference in what the wood can do. The reality is that the staves are so different that I can’t make a comparison. The Ash was about 2’ in diameter and the Elm and 2 1/2” so just completely different cross sections.
I’ve made this one the same length at 61” (1” longer than the ash) as that was the length of the stave. This piece is what I call a “top”, the elm saplings round here grow to about 5-6’ then have the first major side branch and then you get a skinnier, wobblier piece above that. For me anything above the first section is bonus wood.

Fire hardened it twice, the first time I didn’t have enough charcoal on the fire and just didn’t get the depth of hardening so I took some more wood off and gave it a second cook.

Plan to start tillering this evening. 40lb would be amazing but I’ll probably end up around 35.

It’s got a bit of a wobble on the top limb which is something I haven’t dealt with yet. I’m going to glue on a ride once I’m sure I’m not going to heat it any more and it’s going to have a modern style arrow shelf so hopefully I can actually hit stuff.

I use some Sunfloweroil (5%) some sort of hardend pine pitch (Kolophonium) (5-10%) and heat it and mix it. Then I add the wax (85-90%) to melt and mix with oil- resin stuff.