Thought I'd put some pics up of a few sets of arrows I've been working on lately.
First set are 3/8" birch and ash, for a 110lb bow. There's a mix of Type 7 (needle bodkins), Type 8 (square bodkins) and M3 or "Tudor" bodkins (horrible name, they're not Tudor at all!) all hand forged by myself. The fletchings are turkey, bound with black silk and the horn inserts are buffalo, tapered and glued into splits.
I've recently been experimenting with split nock inserts, as it's something I noticed when handling some of the Mary Rose arrows - generally people have been sawing the slots with hacksaws or even tile saws which leaves huge thick slots that need filling with very thick strips of horn, and this just isn't what the originals are like. They're paper thin, and the only way to achieve the correct size "gap" is to open the grain using a knife blade and glue tapered horn strips into the slot.
The next arrows were for a museum display, and feature a variety of heads on authentic arrowshafts.
And the final set are the arrows that I made for a film released on Tod's Workshop Channel. The brief was straightforward - make the most authentic arrows possible, from end to end.
The shafts are black poplar and ash (we only used the ash shafts on the day), the fletchings are swan, bound with red and green silk into a verdigris compound - beeswax, lamb kidney fat and copper verdigris - and the horn inserts are local Dorset cow horn, peeled from the main horn core with a knife blade to get naturally tapered paper-thin strips and glued into the split nock ends with hide glue.
The heads are forged in wrought iron (low grade) and are exact copies of a military head in the Museum of London, ID number 7568. Half were left pure wrought and water quenched, and the other half were case hardened in hoof, horn, leather and sugar before quenching.
