how to make a leather arm guard for shooting a bow

Hi,

The last few days I have been quite busy with all kind of designs for my tattoo website and also some hobby art projects. I wanted to create a leather armguard, to match the handle wrap on my first maple flatbow. There were a few large pieces of leather left. First I made a did some measurements on my arm and created a full size template for the armguard. Here you see the high quality template, you can use it for cutting your own guard as well. I also added a finger tab outline, so you have a complete set for your bow:

 You can click the image and download the high quality picture. If you print it, make sure the line is 10 cm, then the arm guard and fingertab will be at the right size.

Simply trace the shape on leather and cut it with a knife or scissors. I punched some holes in the sides of the guard with this piece of equipment:

Then you can press some metal rings in the holes for a smooth finish. A piece of paracord is used to strap it around the arm. You can use a simple knot, or get the element/button from a raincoat that straps your jacket, not sure how you name it...

The final piece has some stitching done on the back of the leather and I added another strip on top for some extra strength.

If you want the template in an Adobe Illustrator .ai file, just send me a message and I will forward the file, so you can adjust it to your own wishes.

Kind regards, Mark

info@storm3d.com

Final maple selfbow design, finishing the bow.

Hi,

Yesterday I posted some images of the maple tree staves and how I started on making a flatbow/selfbow. The rough shape of the bow is ready, now it is time to tiller the limbs by using my tillering tree.
It's made of a simple 2 by 4 inch beam with markings every inch. The top of the tillering stick holds the bow in a horizontal position.

Before you start to tiller on the stick, you should floortiller the bow, so you can see if the limbs are bending. If the limbs are too strong, you should remove some wood on each limb and tiller it again:

Here's a video on how to tiller your bow. This is part 4 of a series, you can watch all episodes on youtube:

After a few hours of tillering the limbs were bending pretty evenly, so I sanded the bow with different increasingly finer sandpaper.

Finally I wanted to put some color to the almost white bow and decided to use brown shoeshine. A couple of coatings were rubbed in and it was finished with 4 layers of clear lacquer.
I wrapped the handle with a piece of brown leather and the top and bottom of the handle with nylon string.

The bowstring is made of two red strands twisted together. The bow has a drawweight of 30 LBS at 28 inches. Here are some pictures of the final bow:

I'm working on a new bow at the moment, so maybe I can show you some more pictures soon.

Kind regards, Mark

How to make a maple flatbow from a cutdown tree

Hi,

In one of my previous posts I showed you how I made a hazel bow for my son. This flatbow was made from a branch of hazel with a diameter of roughly 2 inch.

The bow building bug really got me, so I wanted to build a full size bow of 68 inch. I was really luck to get offered some nice trees/trunks with a diameter of 8-10 inches. My parents just moved to a new place and in their garden there were some maple trees. Nice straight ones of more than 3 meters. Once they were cut down I picked them up and tried to split the logs using an axe and some wedges.

This was some really hard work and it took me over one hour to split the 3 trunks in 12 staves. Only half of the staves were suitable for bowmaking, the other pieces were twisted too much and will be used as logs for the fireplace.

Here are a few pictures of the staves I cut:

Before I could use the staves, they needed to be dried. Normally it would take a few months, but to speed up the process I made a heatbox/hotbox from insulation board, duct tape and a few 75 Watt bulbs. The temperature gets up to around 150 degrees Fahrenheit (65 Celsius) and it takes down the drying process to around one or two weeks.

Here is a perfect description on how to make a hotbox on Poor Folk Bows

Once the staves were dry I drew the layout of the bow on the stave and roughly cut out the shape with my drawknife:

I used my draw knife and rasps to get both limbs down to the width and thickness that I needed and then put it on my tillering stick to see if the limbs were bending equally.
Here's a video on how to make and set up your tillering stick:

And here's a nice video on how the actual tillering process works.
You can see more videos on the website of Derek Hutchinson, a British bowyer

That's it for now, I will get back with new pictures of how the bow design progresses.

Any questions? Just let me know.

Kind regards, Mark