Here are a few pictures of an urban crossbow pistol that I have made. All of the parts are made mostly from wood with just a few nails used as pins, 4 dry wall screws and 2 little strips of flashing to hold it together. The bow is made from around 20 of them wooded coffee stir sticks. If you try to glue them together they will just snap on you, learnt that the hard way, o well. But if you just bind them together with string then they will slip on each other and make a nice bow. I never measured that bow but it’s about 12” tip to tip and around 4 pounds of draw at 5 ¾”. The bolt is just a blunt one that I made from a chopstick. I have made some more, made arrowheads out of banding, 2 broad heads that are like trade points and then I tried to make one that looks like a spear point and is folded around the arrow shaft, for the fletching I used the flight feathers from a raven and a rooster. It works pretty good, when you hold it at about a 45 degree angle it will shoot an arrow about 40 feet. It will work for pickin off rats at about 10 feet. Here is
This is how it works:
The trigger is made to slide straight backwards when you pull on it, it has a pin that fits into a slot on the bottom of the “nut” (that piece that you see that is sticking up from the top there), the pressure from the bow string locks it all together until you pull the trigger backwards and that pin disengages from the “nut” allowing the bowstring to snap forward and send the bolt flying down range.
Here’s some pictures of it:
What do you think of it?