Thursday, October 11, 2012

Longbow making course in Gloucestershire


My Mum recently booked myself and Dad onto this 4 day bow making course. We made a home guard style flat bow from a large ash tree that we felled on the first day, but you could have made traditional a longbow too (a little more tricky for the beginner).

The course (more details here) is held over 2 weekends which roughly breaks down as follows:

Day one:

  • Knife and axe techniques
  • Making simple wood tools such as wedges and pegs
  • Choosing and felling a large tree with axes
Day two:
  • Splitting the trunk
  • Marking and measuring the your split section with the bow dimensions
  • Rough shaping to end with a bow 'blank' which will now dry ready for the second weekend
Day three:
  • Making and using a draw knife type tool
  • Removing the bark layer
  • Carving and shaping the bow and starting to flex it by hand
Day four
  • Cutting the notches for the string
  • Fine tuning the bows shape and strength with tilling 
  • Making arrows
  • Making the string
  • Firing the bow and trying to hit a target!

Here's Dad busy carving away with the kettle boiling ready for a tea break

The instructor Nick Showing how to do the tilling

Overall it was a very enjoyable 4 days and very highly recommended at a cost of £360 (food included) and it books up very fast. I learned a lot of techniques that can be used to for lots of other projects and you come away with a great looking usable bow too, see mine below. Some people camped in the wood too and cooked dinner together on the fire etc, if you could do this I think it would really add to the experience too.




2 comments:

  1. Nice job on the bow! That course looks awesome. Camping there over the weekends sounds like it would add to it even more. Good stuff

    ReplyDelete
  2. cheers dude, I'll let you know about the next one that comes up!

    ReplyDelete