Heavy Turkish style bows

[Marc St Louis]

How are your arms these days Pat?  I remember you had an interest in making/shooting bows such as these years ago.

[PatM]

Arms are still  good  but obtaining the materials needed for making a high weight bow discouraged me from spending more money on iffy horn.
 I spent a small fortune on some that was unusable except for inserts/tips etc.
 I would like to just make an extremely high weight  static recurve and see what's up there.

[mikekeswick]

Well Badger I am currently making a set of three Turkish hornbows. One warbow style at around 60#, a flight bow of around 60 -70# and just for the hell of it i'm making one with the same dimensions as one of the heavier flight bows in his table of measurements (of actual bows in the Palace collection). I was making the heavy one as a wall hanger but if someone can shoot it....I'll put it in the post  I can only manage around 100# now. Obviously this is one for the future because the cores have only just been bent to shape.
Also those tests were done on a shoting machine, Adam says that the release was far from clean so the figures are likely a little low.
There is a Bulgarian chap called George who posts bows on here. The last one he posted was a heavy longbow and he looked like he was pulling it with ease. I rememebr thinking when I saw his picture that Adam should send him a bow to test. 
Those Turkish flight records are still there. Really we should be able to at least get close to them nowadays....wouldn't you think 

[Badger]

  Mike, I don't put much stock in the Sultans records. It appears everything he did was a superfete of some kind. Kind of like the leader over in North Korea.

[}|{opukc]

There are many people who are pulling heavy war. I cope successfully with 140 English . I have not pulled far serious Turkish War, but about 110 hungarian is not a problem for me. Turkish style about 120 maybe, but no thumb of course.

[PatM]

Even if you don't want to believe the Sultan's record there are still scores of 700-800 plus yard shots on record.

[Badger]

  Admittedly I am not much a student on the history of thse bows. Adam is getting speeds up to about 357 fps. With an ideal modern arrow I believe this might go about 800 yards or less. I just find it hard to believe that using a natural wooden arrow with feather fletching traveling much over about 500 yards. The old forgewood shafts previously used did record some good distances in the middle of the last century. If you know of any good sites I can visit to read up on this I would be happy to visit them.
Shooting a 50# all wood bow about the lightest arrow I can shoot that will still maintain suffcient stiffness is around 170 grains. Shooting 150# bow would require additional mass in the arrow to keep it stiff enough, maybe 300 grains minimum. The heavier bows do have an advantage in that the momentum of the heavier arrows is better able to overcome the drag which will remain fairly constant. My guess is that shooting under modern rules using wood arrows we will never see the turkish bows hit 600 yards. Unless they allready have in which case I would be dead wrong.

[Badger]

  I went back and checked and see that Don Brown did shoot an unlimited bow 619 yards with a wood arrow so maybe 700 yards would be a better milestone.

[PatM]

Wooden footbows have hit over 800 yards with wooden arrows.

[mikekeswick]

What we need is to shoot some perfect arrows from a heavy weight maximised Turkish flight bow - then we will know 
Badger - have you read Adam's book? There is some very good stuff in there.
I am certainly no expert but I think parchment may have been used for the fletchings.
My best flying arrows have been shaped to the same proportional dimensions as some actual Turkish flight arrows....but the skill to make a good small fletch from parchment is still eluding me...big numb fingers!
I wish I had more time to devote to making flight bows.
I would be happy to send my heavy flight bow to someone to be shot/tested at the salt flats. At least that is if it survives to full draw!

[Badger]

  I have Adams book, I need to read it, I tend to browse through it fairly often just reading bits and pieces. I agree with the parchment, it might make a huge difference.

[dragonman]

Hey Badger ..make yourself one!!!....I made one ...it only took a year and half and it broke when I strung it

[mikekeswick]

Hey Badger ..make yourself one!!!....I made one ...it only took a year and half and it broke when I strung it

There is more going on in these bows than meets the eye! I've found that it is vital to follow every bit of info in that book without trying to be smart and thinking' oh but I could do it like this....' that was my problem from the start I thought well I know about wooden bows surely a hornbow is just a wooden bow with some horn glued on......right?....Wrong!
I'm onto my 5th/6th and 7th hornbows....I finally am confident that nothing will fail with them now. Looking back my first few were destined to failure! Well did you learn why it broke? That's the important thing!

[Coonst]

Hi everyone

I am trying to be able to use heavy turkish (well ... oriental...) style bows, and struggle with three problems, which are maybe a challenge for others, too. The most obvious and already mentioned one is to get such a bow. More challenging is the shooting-technique required for these bows, because it is way more complex then what I have learned as "traditional (western)" archery. This is a matter of practice, just as the drawweight, where I can handle ~80 pounds at the moment. My personal problem is quite boring, because I am tall. As far as I understand these bows, they were made for a <28" drawlenght for a reason, like shorter arrows are lighter and short limbs move faster ... and so on. When I follow the manuscripts on shooting these bows as slavishly as I can, my stable drawlength is arround 33-34 inces... which makes it hard to put my results in a relation to the real ones with their intended drawlenght.
I know these are "lame excuses" for not having any interesting results for that topic right now, but I try and may succeed in the (hopefully near  ) future.

[mikekeswick]

Hi Coonst and welcome.
For your drawlength a Turkish style hornbow should be around 52 -53 inches ntn.
Are you using a thumbring?