Making father and son wood recurve bows
Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2016 9:26 am
Hello all and cheers from Sydney,
this is my first post here and I must say it's great to see so many folk hand-crafting such beautiful things out of wood. Great to see these skills being maintained.
When our little boy was about 3, my wife made him a tiny "bow and arrow" set out of a few wooden skewers. Young William spent hours and hours firing this little thing (arrows all had corks on them). Now he is 6 and a very active little outdoors man and is showing a real keenness to become more serious about archery. I took him to Abbey Archery at Cherrybrook the other day and he got to fire a little compound bow (Bear Cruzer Lite) which despite his tiny frame, fired an arrow at an astonishing pace. He was hooked (we didn't buy).
For years I have hand-made furniture, trying to use traditional approaches where possible: hand-cut dovetails, mortise/tenon joints etc. with fine timbers and now am starting to think seriously about making a matching recurve bow set for Will and myself. As a side note - I also shoot large format and old manual film cameras and am drawn far more to the beauty and simplicity and corresponding challenge of using these beautiful pieces well, hence our inclination to make and fire our own more traditional archery equipment rather than buying high-tech compound bows. I can only imagine how satisfying it will be!
So after that long-winded intro, I would love to chat with anyone who can lead us. I am currently researching the following:
- plans that I could scale to make 2 timber only laminated bows (his span is 114 cm => draw ~18", mine is 176 cm => ~28"),
- Australian timbers that may be suitable - for starters we'll stick to timber, maybe look at fiberglass for the next ones,
- undecided on take-down or not,
- any recommended timber suppliers (I use Trend Timbers out at Windsor).
I can see archery being a fabulous hobby for us to add to our growing list. How wonderful if he can also be involved in the design/build as well.
Many thanks for your time and I look forward to sharing our progress with you!
Regards,
David
this is my first post here and I must say it's great to see so many folk hand-crafting such beautiful things out of wood. Great to see these skills being maintained.
When our little boy was about 3, my wife made him a tiny "bow and arrow" set out of a few wooden skewers. Young William spent hours and hours firing this little thing (arrows all had corks on them). Now he is 6 and a very active little outdoors man and is showing a real keenness to become more serious about archery. I took him to Abbey Archery at Cherrybrook the other day and he got to fire a little compound bow (Bear Cruzer Lite) which despite his tiny frame, fired an arrow at an astonishing pace. He was hooked (we didn't buy).
For years I have hand-made furniture, trying to use traditional approaches where possible: hand-cut dovetails, mortise/tenon joints etc. with fine timbers and now am starting to think seriously about making a matching recurve bow set for Will and myself. As a side note - I also shoot large format and old manual film cameras and am drawn far more to the beauty and simplicity and corresponding challenge of using these beautiful pieces well, hence our inclination to make and fire our own more traditional archery equipment rather than buying high-tech compound bows. I can only imagine how satisfying it will be!
So after that long-winded intro, I would love to chat with anyone who can lead us. I am currently researching the following:
- plans that I could scale to make 2 timber only laminated bows (his span is 114 cm => draw ~18", mine is 176 cm => ~28"),
- Australian timbers that may be suitable - for starters we'll stick to timber, maybe look at fiberglass for the next ones,
- undecided on take-down or not,
- any recommended timber suppliers (I use Trend Timbers out at Windsor).
I can see archery being a fabulous hobby for us to add to our growing list. How wonderful if he can also be involved in the design/build as well.
Many thanks for your time and I look forward to sharing our progress with you!
Regards,
David