MR replica (pics)

[Davepim]

Kviljo,
     I have a question regarding your sidenocks, seeing as you are one of very few people who get them to work well for you. What knots are you using top and bottom? The close up of one of your nocks suggests that your bowstring has a loop and that this is passed through itself to make a slipknot; am I seeing this correctly? How does it hold and how easy is it to loosen when unstringing?

Cheers, Dave

[outcaste]

Hi,

Nicely made bow Kviljo. I am interested in the width profile and fade to the tips as this has a bearing on the overall draw weight of the bow. Interestingly enough I am also constructing an 'approximation' that has the same amount of growth rings as the original (well mine has 65 per inch and the original has 68, I think this is close enough) and is dimensionally correct width/depth. This bow is tillered to 18ins at the moment and is projecting to over 150lbs at 32. The bow is also 4 inches longer than the original! If we assume that arrows on the MR were on average 30ins then your bow would have a draw weight of around 60 odd pounds I guess? Fine I think against unarmoured sailors, but not plate armour. I would be interested in how far your bow would shoot a 60gram arrow with appropriate medieval fletchings though.

Anyway good to see some bows on this part of the forum.

Cheers,
Alistair

[Jaro]

Nice bow. Little flat inner limb on the left side, which I  perceive is lower limb on the fulldraw pic.

Kviljo, your argument about Nydam bows being light is nonsequiturial. The question was about "medieval", which 200-300 AD is not, that is late roman/iron age. Anyway, the question asked should probably sound : "Do you think that any bowman will go into battle with a bow underpowered for the task in respect to enemy armour and artilery?" The answer is aparently "No, or he wont live for too long."
Nydam bows in their age of use were aparently sufficient for kiling unarmored or very lightly clad men - and again that is what an experienced craftsperson can easy judge by the construction of arrows and arrowheads. (Which is by the way pretty consistent with the traits of naval combat).(And archeologist can supply the context of the time and material culture.
Im usually first to cry : "caution" whenever I see sensationist post, but I would think that median range of drawweight for MR bows 120-130# can be taken as established fact.
On the other hand we can safely say that bows in the originally perceived range (60#-80#-90#) have not sufficient performance in the context of late medieval and tudor archery.

J.

[Jaro]

That said a bow of similar dimensions and profile made out of very coarse park grown (light) yew by my buddy Paja came out at nice 125# and delivers very good distances.
Same yew has strange weight/stiffness ratio.

J.

[Kviljo]

Dave, you are interpreting the picture correctly. I use the spliced slipknot loop for the top nock and a reinforced bowyers knot (or a kyodo-knot) on the lower nock. This bow is no problem stringing without a stringer, and it works without any problems. On heavier bows with FF string, the knot on the lower limb tend to slip after some shooting, lowering the braceheight. The spliced selftightening loop on the upper nock seems to tighten quite a bit, although it's not a big problem to loosen it as long as it is used together with a stringer.

Outcaste, this picture shows the width-profile:


~60# @ 30" is a good guess. I've got some 1/2" - 3/8" ash shafts that I will try with it. They won't leave the bow in a hurry, hehe
It is interesting to hear these numbers from replica bows. Is it enlish yew you are working with? It must be pretty dense


Jaro, yep, Nydam is from the roman period. But just for the sake of the argument, hehe, it is only 175 years too early to be defined as medieval (if we stretch the space-definition of the start of the medieval period a little). So from the evidence of the Nydam bows, one could easily state that archers in the medieval period went into battle with 60-70# bows... - like adb asked
Other than that, we agree

[outcaste]

Outcaste, this picture shows the width-profile:


~60# @ 30" is a good guess. I've got some 1/2" - 3/8" ash shafts that I will try with it. They won't leave the bow in a hurry, hehe
It is interesting to hear these numbers from replica bows. Is it enlish yew you are working with? It must be pretty dense

Thanks for the pic. Is the width 4ins beneath the knock around 1in as the limb looks pretty slim? Sorry for all the questions, but is this based on an actual MR Bow dimensions?

Yes my bow is made from English Yew.

Cheers,
Alistair

[Kviljo]

1" wide 4" down from the nock seems plausible. Just below the horn it is 11 or 11,5mm wide (and 12mm thick). 39 x 31mm at the handle. And a little over 80" ntn. Other than that I haven't made it with the slide caliper. It is probably a little too thin and of course too long compared to the originals, as I wrote somewhere. That would at least account for some of the baby-weight.

[Kviljo]

I measured - it is 21 and 20mm wide 4" down from the nocks.

It shot:
150 yards with a 46 gram arrow with 6" fletchings
136 yards with a 68 gram 1/2"-3/8" ash shaft with 7" fletchings
125 yards with a 80 gram 1/2"-3/8" ash shaft with 7" fletchings
219 yards with a 37 gram parallell 11/32" flight arrow with 2" parabolic feathers

15 strand ff+ string. The arrows were drawn 29-32".

[adb]

Nice bow Kviljo!
     My last bow in Italian yew was very very similar in dimensions to this but weighed in at a tad over 120lb at 32". I have tried shooting 1/2" to 3/8" bobtailed shafts that weigh in at just over 90g from another bow of 75lb draw weight and they just don't work; I doubt I'd get 100m distance and absolutely no chance of going through plate armour! I really don't think arguments that the MR bows might have  been around the 100lb mark, or even less, will hold water.

Cheers, Dave

I agree. 125 yards with an 80g arrow is not adequate. I do not believe for a second that medieval archers went into battle with a 60# bow. Don't get me wrong... your bow is beautiful in every way, it's just too light to be a true MR replica.

[Kviljo]

And I agree

I don't know of anyone that has examined the smallest bow within the MR-find yet. That would be quite interesting 

[Yewboy]

And I agree

I don't know of anyone that has examined the smallest bow within the MR-find yet. That would be quite interesting 

Yes you do?

[Kviljo]

huh?

125 yards with an 80 gram arrow is not enough. A 1234 grain arrow would normally be shot by a 123,4 pound bow. Trying to shoot it from a bow of half the draw weight won't result in an adequate distance...

Still, it is probably quite likely that 60# bows were taken into battle in the medieval period. Perhaps not in 16th century England, but after all the Mary Rose bows aren't medieval either...

[Rod]

Whilst it is often true that a thin looking bow is a light bow it is not always the case. I have a Boyton bow made from a very dense piece of Oregon yew that drew 90 lb at 32" and was always assumed to be 65 to 70lb at most by those who looked at it.
Alongside this bow Jaro's 90 lb Bickerstaffe bow looked like a fencepost.

As to this bow, it is a creditable effort, but it is a hunting weight bow, not a true warbow weight.
But then I regard 90 lb as marginal/transitional as a true war bow weight
I would like to have see slightly more flush side nocks and I see at least 3 or 4 thin spots in the tiller and the string looks a little loosely made.
Not a tight re-inforced made in the hand string as I was taught to make them.

Also I think it is more than likely that 100 lb plus bows have been around for a lot longer than some folks seem to believe, although it is no doubt true that the type derives from the development of heavy hunting bows.

I realise that it seems to be the fashion to respond to every post with positive comment, nothing wrong with a positive attitude, but I would prefer to see rather more constructive comment and perhaps a little less blind admiration.

Rod.

PS. Away teaching public access long bow archery until the 29th, so excuse me if I don't respond immediately to any comment.

[Kviljo]

Of course, denser woods give a lot thinner bows. I think I mentioned it, but I've got another norwegian yew longbow which is a lot smaller and still 40 punds heavier than this one. I once handeled a Stratton 120# flightbow, which looked like a 60# bow. It was really heavy in weight though. Yew usually gives a larger bow for a given weight than other woods. Ipe for example...
A nice experiment would be to make two replicas of the smalles MR-bow, one from dense yew and one from less dense yew. If nothing else, it would give an interesting new set of data for the interpretation of the MR draw weights. As it is now, we only seem to have the upper limit setteled to be from 200 to 120#. - so there's really no good evidence to back up any statement on what the lower range of draw weights was like.

The more you twist a string, the more stress you put on each fiber, which results in more elastisity with the stronger stuff and more risk with e.g. linnen. So I usually twist them no more than necessary for them to hold together while also making sure the cross section stays reasonably round. This is a 3x5 ply ff+ string. That one is overly safe The less you twist the less strands you can get away with, so with flightbows I twist them even less.

And just as a general comment: When it comes to constructive comments and spots on the tiller...   ...a picture is really not enough to give detailed advice. To do that you need an overview of things like local density of the wood, knots, amount of sapwood/heartwood, the shape of the cross section, the shape of the natural growth and most basicly - the width of each section of the bow.  What pictures are good for are considering the gereral shape of the tiller compared to the width-profile of the bow, and of course for considering symmetry.

[Kviljo]

I forgot to mention it, the nocks are loosely based on the one preserved from the MR.