For Christmas 2014, my present from my wife was to join a course run the following spring, in which I’d spend four days in the woods making a primitive flatbow. Run by Jamie of the Wild Bushcraft Company and supported by Ferg of Ferg’s Forge, the course aimed to provide every attendee with the chance to build a flatbow from a freshly-felled ash tree.
Day One
The ash had been felled the day before we arrived on site, taken down as part of the management plan for the woodland. Our first task was to carefully split the trunk into roughly eight sections using wedges, and carry them out to our working area. Each attendee took a section, with Jamie and Ferg each working along on other sections to both demonstrate each step of the process but also to provide a back-up stave that could be used by one of us if ours snapped. Apparently it is exceptionally unusual for a course to get through all four days without a broken bow, but our cohort managed it!
The rest of the first day was spent removing the bark carefully so as not to damage the outermost layer of growth beneath it. This first ring of wood becomes the back of our bows, the side that faces away from the archer and that is under massive tension while the bow is being drawn. By leaving the fibres here intact, the maximum amount of strength is retained in the wood and damaging this delicate new growth could lead to rapid unplanned disassembly of the bow at some point in the future. As I am very fond of having both my eyeballs entirely free of large splinters, I took great care at this stage.
The afternoon was spent thinning the belly of the stave (the inner side, closest to the heart of the tree and the side that is under compression when the bow is being used) and carefully thinning it down to a consistent 3 inches or so in width.
Day Two
The second day focused on preparing the stave further, marking out an outline of the finished bow based on each bowyer’s height, with a consistent width throughout the length. Then began the arduous process of taking bulk material from the sides and rear of the stave to work it down to the desired thickness, roughly two inches deep at the thickest part. Again, great care was needed not to damage the back of the stave nor to cut too deeply in on each side in areas where strength was required, such as the handle.
Given this was a slightly gruelling process given the use of hand tools, time was also spent harvesting suitable hazel stems for arrows, debarking them, and then drying and straightening them over the camp fire in the evening.
Thinning the belly of the bow continued under great care, with the aim being to end up with a thickness in the limbs of only a few growth rings depth. The process involves slowly ‘chasing the ring’, carving out the belly of the bow progressively until a single, unbroken growth ring runs from the tip to the handle on each limb. This ensures there is the same degree of elasticity in each limb of the bow, and that, more or less, they should curve equally when a force is applied to them through a bowstring.
Throughout the work, ‘floor tillering’ to take place; a process by which the limbs of the bow are bent by pressing them against the floor and the bowyer’s weight applied to see how they bend. Once they were starting to curve nicely, a long string was tied around the tips of each limb of the bow to enable tillering proper to take place. This involves pulling on the bow in the way the archer will when using the bow, and observing the way the wood works as it bends.
Day Three
The day consisted of further tillering and refining work; where one limb bends less than the other, wood is removed from the stiffer limb to help it curve more. Where one of the limbs is bending at an angle rather than curving gracefully (“hinging”), wood is removed from either side of the weak spot to share the strain more evenly throughout the bow.
With primitive bows such as these there’s no ability to add material back on (bowyers will sometimes wrap or coat limbs of a bow with materials like linen or hide to make a laminate structure, which can compensate for some weakness in the wood), so any over-keen adjustment that removes too much wood from somewhere on the bow needs to be matched with removing more elsewhere to balance it back up, akin to chopping bits off a table’s legs to stop it rocking…
Again, the work is slow and frustrating at times, so to provide a rest and a diversion (stressed bowyers leads to overly-stressed and snapped bows), breaks were spent nocking, fletching and pointing the hazel stems into arrows. Mine had all the characteristics of telegraph poles – straight, heavy and completely ridiculous to use – but ultimately, were highly satisfying to make and were well-matched to the high draw weight of the bow I was ending up with.
These were finished off while sat around the campfire in the evenings when it was too dark to safely use the axes and drawknifes, but simple knives and fletching tools such as a simple jig for aligning the fletchings (feathers) at nice 120′ angles along the shaft could be used.
Day Four
The final day was spent making the bowstrings from B-50 Dacron, a highly elastic synthetic bowstring that doesn’t unduly stress limbs like more modern materials but that is considerably more reliable and easier to use than say, nettle or linen cordage. This was largely done for us and I’ll not pretend otherwise, but the string was then ‘served’ with the addition of a whipping across the central section where the arrow is nocked. As someone well-used to whipping the ends of lines for sailing sheets and lines, I was very happy to at least do this for myself!
The serving, as its name suggests, serves to protect the string from wear and tear, and also provides sufficient thickness to it for the arrow to comfortably engage and hold on to without slipping off.
With a string finally on our bows, it was then possible to try out our new creations at a suitable target – here, from around 10-15 metres.
(More squeamish and, perhaps too, more bloodthirsty, readers should note that it’s not legal to hunt with a bow and arrow in the UK – no deer were hurt as a result of the course or the resulting bows!)
The finished result was a flatbow of around 50lb draw weight, made in green wood that would further stiffen and strengthen the bow as it dried over the coming weeks. After spending time strapped to my bannisters at home, the bow ended up verging on being too heavy for me to use accurately at all, and I had to carefully shave back both limbs with a cabinet scraper to make it something I could comfortably use.
Ultimately however, the goal wasn’t to make something that would become a daily bow, but to try making something I hadn’t tried before with green wood while living out in the forest for a few days. All in all – entirely successful!
