English longbows can be tough!

[duffontap]

I think my heavy flatbow is 69" ntn and 1 1/2" wide.  It's the crabapple bow which I suppose has a similar density to horn beam.  I've drawn it 30" or so.  Pretty amazing wood--no set.  I'm just finishing another crabapple bow I've been working on for a long time.  I'll post it soon.  I wish I could get more of that wood.   

          J. D.

[mullet]

Hey J D,I wasn't trieing to pick a fight with you.I was just commenting on the same attitude that Hillbilly has seen also.I don't have a problem with ELB's.I like making them myself.The comment about learning new things was your quote.
   As far as short bows or bows that are not ELB's which seems to be the issue.There are lot's of different ones.Re curve,RF/DF,and so on.I wouldn't hunt anything here with one of those West coast bows myself.But the Indigenous people probally had to do what was needed to eat.
   I know it's illeagle to hunt in alot of foreign countries,the people living there let that happen but that's another issue.If that attitude catches on here I'm sure we could look forward to the same thing.I target shoot also.I'm going to a shoot Sunday as I do every other Sunday when it's not hunting season.I guess I am narrow minded,I build bows to hunt with,I go to 3-D shoots for the camaraderie and to hone my shooting skills for hunting.I don't care about trophies and plaques.Like I said, I wasn't trieing to pick a fight,But it always seems like If somebody doesn't agree about how brilliant the ELB is then the ELB community gets real defensive.

[Justin Snyder]

Steve Allelly has an English longbow in his personal collection and told me not long ago that he had to ditch his Ishi-style bow for his English longbow in the middle of hunting season because the little bow was hurting his elbow and he was having accuracy problems.  He prefers hunting with a Native American design but says an English longbow is more accurate and it obviously adapts to his style of hunting. 

Generally speaking, there is a cast and power advantage with longer bows.  Less stack equates to higher early draw weight and more working length allows for longer draws and fat fd curves.  "Short bows perform almost unbelievably slower than longer bows,"  Tim Baker. 

Because it does not fit Steve Allelly's (whomever that is) hunting style, don't mean anything.  You would never get a shot off with that long of a bow when hunting around here. You have to get to dang high off the ground to draw and will be seen. 
While length does add to stability, it does not necessarily add to performance. The additional weight of the long limbs can in fact rob more energy than it gives.  Short bows shoot with equal draw length shoot faster, until the string angle becomes an issue.  This can be solved with re curves. If we were to compare range and energy, I would be packing a Asiatic Hornbow.  Short with high draw weight and no fretting. 
Ironically Baker states that Ishi style bows, wide limb narrow handle, D-bows, are the hardest to tiller.  I would think the shorter and heavier the less forgiving.  But I hate to even compare bows.  What is next? Comparing compounds?  Justin

[D. Tiller]

I'm going to stay out of this one but to say I met Steve at the Black Butes Knappinn. (Nice guy to boot!) He was showing the bow and arrow he just used to take a nice little buck. I believe it was a Maidu style bow but not to sure about it.  These short bows do make meat but they are meant for ambush hunting and close in shots. Steve also mentioned he liked bows arround 45# for hunting in this style since they allowed you to hold draw for a while untill the deer was in just the right position for the shot to be taken. He also said that most of the originals were even lighter in weight.

But the cool thing is that the 50# short Modoc bows a few friends I made there, Yep Billy and Dave thats you guys! , had 50# bows arround 50-56" long that were shooting just as fast if not faster and just as accurate as some of the ELB's I've come across in simmilar weight range. Personaly I think you need to judge bows used by past societies not against eachother but against the environments and sittuations they were being used in.

Just my personal two cents on the subject!

David T

[Trapper]

I think there has been a mixup on what you all are talking about some say a dbow and I was thinking All english longbows do have a d cross section, thats because they could turn out alot of bows fast, not haveing the big flat surface to scrape made tillering the elb alot faster, by being able to take off narrower strips on the rounded belly, Right? Well I can still make a ALB shoot harder and farther than a english tillered bow, because I have done the testing, and the english were lucky to have yew to do it with because it can stand the compression on the round belly.D crosssection isnt the same as a D tiller.     Trappe Or am I just blowing SMOKE

[SimonUK]

Personaly I think you need to judge bows used by past societies not against eachother but against the environments and sittuations they were being used in.

Exactly. The purpose of the english longbow was to launch a very heavy arrow to punch through armour. To launch such an arrow a respectable distance you need a long draw length, hence the long bow. It's pointless comparing it with a bow designed for sneaking up on a deer.

For many of us, its not just the design of the longbow that makes it attractive, its all the history surrounding it.

[gpw]

Apples and oranges... Seems like all tillering is tough... tillering is where you" put the cards on the table".. the single most important part of all bowmaking , especially if you're looking for performance, as we all are ... Traditional D section elb's seem  much easier to tiller with the right wood ...good yew... even cedar
Flat bows seem so much less "wood critical"..you can tiller a shovel handle if you're good enough...

I'm sure there was a long apprenticeship for the  English bowyer... same old story ...Practice...Practice...Practice
Just for Fun and practice we regularly make 18" -24"test bows of all shapes which shoot nail tipped bamboo skewers (2 fletch) through the chronograph >200fps.. that gets their attention...

[Hillbilly]

D crosssection isnt the same as a D tiller.     Trappe Or am I just blowing SMOKE

Nope, not blowing smoke. What I refer to as a D-bow is a bow with a D tiller (no relation to D. Tiller with a period after the D-the notorius world-renowned maker and purveyer of fine soaps  ) Having a D-shaped cross section sets the ELB apart from most other D-bows, which are usually flat or semi-flat bellied designs with the exception of a few round cross-sectioned ones.

[duffontap]

Justin,
Steve A. is one of the TBB authors and coauthored the Encyclopedias of Native American bows and arrows with Jim Ham.  He also draws most of the illustrations for the work in the Bowyer's Bibles.  I used him as an example because he knows what he's talking about and even though he is an ambush hunter, he can use and elb in his blinds and tree stands. 

As far as performance goes, a lot of people seem to think that a 45 degree string-angle stack is the only thing you are trying to avoid.  A 72" bow stores more energy in ten inches of draw than a 69" bow.  I know there are obvious limits to lengthening due to limb mass/string mass etc.  With heavy arrows, the performance advantage is nearly always with the longer bow. 

Mullet,
I was just reacting to what I perceive to be a general 'Native Americans never made a mistake' attitude. 

I still wish to ask short bow advocates how Howard Hill managed to kill anything with a 72" bow if its too long to hunt with.  The Thompson brothers hunted Mullet's neck of the woods with bows up to 84". 

Good discussion.  I hope no one is going to assume that I think the ELB is the only good design.  In my reading, I have found that they tend to be treated as markedly inferior to American designs and I do disagree with that. 

                  J. D. Duff

[Badger]

JD, I normaly try to avoid using fps numbers here because it has more to do with the shooter sometimes than the bows they are testing, but just speaking for my own bows tested side by side I have gotten the normal hunting weight elbs into the same speed range as the albs, the albs do seem to average out a bit faster but not by that much. The design has to match the wood regardless of the style you are building. Whern building a heavy bow, especially a longer draw heavy bow the design almost begs to be an elb. When using a heavy wood like osage say in the 60# or less class you have to kind of fudge the tiller and leave the center stiff to get any kind of performance out of them most of the time so the alb seems to make more sense for them. A 60" elb style with osage can perform very well even bending through the handle. I don't think there is a best style just a best style for what you are making and what you have to make it with. If you were to make a fiberglass elb say 140# and 80" long that bent through the handle I imagine you could run as fast as the arrow. Steve

[Justin Snyder]

Trapper, I usually assume that people are referring to a D-tiller, unless the say Profile.

JD, A longer bow may or may not store more energy. But it is putting more back into the arrow that counts. A longer bow has more wood. This increases the mass, possibility for hysteresis, and possibility of string stretch. You just have to many variables. A 50" recurve with a low brace will without doubt store more energy than a straight bow of 70" if drawn to 10". But at a long draw may not put the energy back into the arrow because of stacking. It could in fact store more energy, but be less efficient.  I think it would be way to broad of a statement to say that any design is more efficient without discussing a million other factors.

You have to be carefull not to believe everything when reading about Native American bows. Some of the information is taken from bows they have seen, already finished. A lot is fill in the blank with your best guess.  I am quite sure that some people have legitemate info, but there are a lot more that are going on hearsay.  Go ask the local NA to teach you about making bows and to teach you their secrets.  You will get very little info.  You cant really blame the NA. Look at how they have been treated.  Look at the Lewis and Clark statement about finding arrowheads in every elk they shot.  I think we can all agree that the statement is somewhat bias. Even today traditional bowyers have a higher recovery rate than rifle hunters. And most of us cannot compete with the NA for accuracy in our wildest hallucinations. 

It said in TBB that they needed lots of bows and the narrow design allowed them to get more bows per tree.  It almost made it sound like the design was achieved by hap-hazard coincidence.  I would suspect it was a little more than an accident.
Justin

[DCM]

I made the argument years ago that an elb limb shape is the most efficient use of material, not just from the obvious pov, but also in terms of mass to energy storage.  This based just on the superficial aspect, hooke's law.  Whether the extra lenght required offets the gains in width was the core of the question.  I resolved it would depend a lot upon the working qualities of the wood in question and the environment it would be used in, essentially the criteria for any bow.  I think it not an accident the elb shape evolved the way it did.  I think it would be difficult to demonstrate a broad generalization of whether it is "better" in any particular aspect, as it would for any bow, because context is the most critical consideration.

I like D bows, and elbs, but for different reasons.

[Badger]

Dave, I think once a bowyer gets some experience behind him the wood starts telling him what is best suited to a certain extent. Some woods and draw weight combinations can be effectively done in a wide variety of ways. Right now I am working on a 120# 72" alb, stiff narrow handled and fade. It really feels odd and my instinct is telling me it would have been much better suited as an elb. I am going to try and finish it up just to see how it works out but am not real confident at this point it will work. I may just have to go for one of those
"as much as I can get out of it " type bows. Around 90# seems like it would be more feasable. Steve

[duffontap]

Justin,

I am aware of the multitude of factors at play.  I assume that when I am talking to you, Badger, Mullet, Marc, Hillbilly, and other experienced bowyers that we are taking those factors into consideration before we present our perspectives.  I also assume that you know the advantage lies with high energy storage when shooting heavy arrows. 

I don't know if you've ever seen this, but there is video footage of an actual Mary Rose bow being pulled on a tillering tree.  They tested a number of them.  What they found was that they had perfect tiller and--despite a variety of bowyer's marks and sections--the draws progressed the same way with the handle bending in the last 3" inches of draw.  These were not mass-produced, short-lived junk bows.  They were masterfully tillered.  What impressed me as I studied them was that they were more complicated than I thought.  Every Mary Rose bow is unique as they were built by a lots of bowyers but they all follow a prescribed pattern that reveals a thorough knowledge of energy storage and mass placement.  For example, they could have used self nocks if they were willing to have 3/4" wide tips, but instead they added horn tips and scraped every extra grain of wood off that they could.  The result was a bow that outperforms $1,200 Blackwidow recurves with arrows @ 9 gr. per pound of draw weight. 

Free Speculation:  If the bow would have performed better with rectangular sections, it's hard to imagine the King of England saying, 'well, let's just build them the fast way anyhow.'  For my money, producing oval-D section limbs like the MR bows is way harder than building flatbows any day of the week. 

On the hunting bow subject:
Being the successful hunter that you are, and taking into consideration that you say you group arrows out to 30+ yards--you have obviously developed a system that works very well.  I'm seriously jealous. 

             J. D. Duff

[Badger]

JD, the more I look at the english longbow the more I can appreciate the science behind them. As you were saying they require a thourough knowledge of all the factors involved, it goes way beyond just good tillering. The money and research that we put into military weaponry was undoubtedly considered just as inportant at the time of the Mary rose bows. I feel certain they had their best minds and best craftsman developing the most effective weaponry they could come up with. When you look at the growth rings on the belly of the mary rose bows it reveals exactly how they expected them to bend. That was interesting that you said the handle only flexed in the last 3 inches of draw, it makes perfect sense. Their limb timing was carefully planned. The limbs probably lay out like a flyline if examined under slow motion. I am really excited that we have some individuals that have taken this back up and are willing to put in the time and effort to rediscover these bows. Steve