Bow-Making : The Long Bow in Red Oak

The "Back" points away from you!

A British Summer weekend in July at The Woodcraft School - with the most talented Bushman. John Rhyder, his bearded assistant bowyer Phil, and Yolena, one seriously grumpy cook. Not forgetting of course the ten keen students, prepared to rough it in a drenched Hampshire woodland for 3 days of pain, injury, frustration and very little by way of liquid refreshment (alcoholic or otherwise).

Full days, 8am til 8pm, with military precision (including the porridge breakfast starts) still didn't seem enough to get done everything we needed to. In fact most of us didn't get to fire our own bows at the end of it either. There are many process steps and personally I think a 5 days course would have been better, certainly more relaxed, but we did the best we could in the time available and covered the following build steps, if only in theory for some;

6ft staves ready and waiting

John, drawing out - following the fibres

Stave Selection - choosing the right piece of wood to start from – bows need half sapwood and half heartwood all the way down the bow to bend correctly with the right compression, and knots (live or dead) need to be in certain places, so its’ life as a living tree is very important to its’ success as a bow later on. I had a hard time at the beginning remembering that the front is actually the back - but thinking of it in terms of heartwood being nearer my heart when drawing the bow and that being the inside of a tree trunk helped - when a living tree bends in the wind it is the heartwood that must compress and the sapwood that must stretch.  I had chosen a stave of red oak; a wood where these differences are far more obvious since the heartwood is red and the sap wood white - as well as it looking beautiful when finished and oiled  - a two-tone long bow.

Drawing Out - marking the stave in the right places before you cut/saw anything to ensure the bow comes from the correct section of the wood and is correctly in proportion. It starts with the centre line which believe it or not is not automatically straight - but must absolutely follow the fibres of the wood the entire length of the stave. The positioning of the grip must be considered along with decisions about weighting, knots and the strength of the person who will draw the bow when it's finished. Women's bows tend to be slightly thinner, as typically we can draw less weight.

D Sectioning or removing wood to shape the cross section of the bow all the way down to the tips into a "D" shape. Not necessary of course if you are making a flat bow as Ant and Alan had chosen to do - smart arses. To make matters even more complicated, the "D" must taper or shrink as it gets nearer and nearer to the tips of the bow! There were lots of fancy tools on offer to use; draw knives, shaves, saws, scrapers, hand axes and what I can only describe as a solid flat cheese grater (I later came to know it as a "rasper"). I decided I wanted to use only the tools I had back at home or Rais - just in case I felt the urge to go through the painful process all over again - plus of course I was completely useless, and quite scary, with some of the other tools and did not trust myself. This meant I was making by long bow with only a knife and a cabinet scraper. It was going to take a while.

Bowstring and Notching - next comes making the bow string itself, waxing it and then notching the bow at either end to ensure the bow string stays in place. When correctly strung, the bowstring should be about a "thumbs up" distance from the belly of the bow (the brace height) - although how one calculates what string length that represents whilst in the woods with a dead straight piece of D section and no ability to see into the future is a mystery to me - so we ploughed on using the trial and error approach, and taking a rough guess at the length of string required and an even rougher guess at the positioning of the loop at the top. We began twisting 12 strands of thread into single bowstrings, and then spent, quite frankly too much time and many frustrating attempts at undoing and remaking the string until it was roughly the right length ... thread wasn't the only thing fraying at this point in the course I can tell you - turns out this is not a job for people with large fingers. Then comes of course the dangerous and nerve-wracking activity of bending the bow to fit said string - which starts with.....

Floor tillering

Floor Tillering or warming up the fibres in the wood, encouraging them to bend - at the same time as sorting out the evenness of bending by removing tiny shaves of wood from the correct places and then warming again. Once the bend is starting to take shape, we move to do the same activity but this time on a tree-mounted tiller. This means we have to first go through the twitchy-bum moment of actually stringing the bow - during which I will admit I prayed - and I'm guessing I was not the only one. Bending a piece of dead straight wood you have spent hours shaping, to fit an infeasibly short piece of home-made string you have remade ten times, without breaking either of them or yourself is not for the feint-hearted.

Tillering - placing the strung bow on the tiller we attach a length of rope on a pulley and gently pull to warm up, bend some more, and check the curvature before deciding where to shave next, we do this for hours. An endless, repetitive cycle of warming, bending, shaving, warming, bending, shaving etc. Tillering has two objectives.... the first is to arrive at the archers draw length, which for a shorty like me is about 26 inches, and the second is to reach the desired draw weight - we did not get this far in the course, so I have no idea what weight my long bow is - but I suspect a session with my handheld luggage scales would soon tell me should I be that curious.

Tree Tiller

Tillering is a process that must be done in very small increments; shave off too much and the whole bow would need to be reduced in size all over to match, and then tillered again from the start, which would make it a much lighter bow and therefore less powerful - or worse.... you could shave off too much from one spot, to the point where it is irrecoverable and you must either start again with a new stave, or cut it down to make a child's bow - not pleasant - as poor Pedro found out on day one. Tillering must also be done very SLOWLY, or the bow will snap.
Warming the fibres cannot be overdone - particularly before attempting to string the bow, as it will need to be bent quite severely and awkwardly at the time (sadly something Pedro and I also discovered on day two whilst trying to string his second bow).

Arrow-Making and Fletching - as time on the two tillers was shared amongst the ten students, there was an amount of waiting time which we used to get started on making arrows. I should probably saying "assembling" arrows instead of making them, as all the components were bought-in items, we simply had to put them together using a number of tools and techniques. As a result, we each came away with 2 or 3 basic arrows in various states of completion - thankfully John had brought along his bucket of arrows for us to have a look at and perhaps practise with - had there been sufficient time at the end.


Oiling & Boning - three coats of linseed oil each with varying amounts of white spirit in and then a layer of beeswax  preceded by the peculiar (and still unconvinced) practise of "boning". Which basically involves taking a smooth pebble (or piece of rounded bone) and rubbing, with some pressure, and at high speed, down the length of the bow, to smooth the wood and bring out the shine. The aim being to tighten the wood on the surface of the bow and deter the fibres from lifting. Too much pressure however and you risk denting the wood instead of simply compacting the outer layer.

Serving - finally came the second (or was it third?) fiddly and frustrating task of the course - the serving. This is basically winding a tiny piece of thread round the bowstring at the point where you will notch your arrow from - so it's both indicative and decorative - I chose red - which has since turned a sort of fuchsia colour - but has at least remained attached in all the right places.

And there you have it - simple! - a traditional longbow, used during numerous successful battles as far back as the Anglo-Norman invasion; Crécy, Poitiers and of course the incredible defeat of the French in the battle of Agincourt over 500 years ago. The longbow as the dominant killer weapon had to come to an end at some point and that point is believed to be around the mid 1600's, the time of the English civil war - when they were sadly replaced with muskets and guns. It's good to see that the Bowyer skills of old are not dead yet though and that people like John Rhyder continue to pass on this knowledge for others to enjoy.