Nearly done. The other day, I made a bastard string to string up the weapon. A bastard string is one way of getting your string on a crossbow, and the more powerful the crossbow, the more excitement you will have
I made this from 1/8" steel wire rated for about 280 lbs. of breaking strength, along with two U bolts and wire rope clips.
I padded the center of the wire with leather to minimize finish damange to the top of the crossbow, as well. The wire will eat into the finish fast.
Before, that, I made a cocking device out of scrap osage and hickory, and some left over hardware. It is not pretty right now, but I will revisit it later and sand and finish it. I wanted to make it with off the shelf hardware if possible, and it worked out okay. I mocked the cocking device up with cardboard to get the geometery right, and it didnt take that long to make this thing, maybe 2 hours. Historically, a goat's foot lever or cranquen would have been used.
Yes, I know it is inelegant, but it worked. The books are on the floor to get the bow off the trigger. And, there was a tiny bit of damage to one of the rolling nut lugs, not much, but a good illustration to why I generally file those down a bit. As long as you have enough of the lugs to hold the string, you are good to go.
The fix for that lug was simply to file down the lug tops a bit. Here that is in progress.
So, the procedure here was to span the bow and then slip the string on. The U bolts allow for this, and hopefully, the lousy pictures show this. I didn't want to mess about taking a lot of pictures, as this procedure is not fun and I wanted to get it done as quickly as possible.
