What attracted me most to primitive archery was that it gave me the opportunity to create a pure and efficient weapon without the use of refined products. One of the first things to become apparent was that I had a lack of knowledge and experience allowing me to accomplish this in a timely fashion. Primitive man solved all these problems, the bows he built 10,000 years ago were every bit as good as the best bows we build today.
Most all the different cultures had their own twist or style on bows but they were all about equally effective.
They usually became very good at working with the materials they had access to prior to U.P.S. Trial and error most likely played the biggest roll and the fact that man was about the only creature that could pass down knowledge from one generation to the next lead to the perfecting of each design. The fact that man seems to be creative by nature and that successful men held higher status in their communities most likely led to developments of new designs which would need perfecting.
In today’s world we build bows primarily as a hobby. We do this for a lot of different reasons but those of us who build wood bows do seem to hold the one thing in common that we like all natural materials, I think it makes us feel closer to the earth we came from. We also enjoy the primitive process of using our hands and eyes and ears to bring something to the finish line as opposed to computers and precision measuring devices.
I can wake up at sunrise and go to work on my shaving horse and pass an entire day, anyone who thinks all I am thinking about is building bows has got it all wrong. I get lost in time while I work on bows, I imagine myself as a primitive man, and sometimes an old wise man and sometimes a very young man who may want to impress a very pretty young lady. Sometimes I think their may be a quarry that we have avoided for lack of an efficient weapon, you get the point I hope. The need to create the best weapon I can using primitive means seems to drive me.
After a hard days work often mixed emotions come in, kind of anticlimactic in some ways. I feel proud that I successfully completed another weapon and will often congratulate myself that my finishing skills have gotten better or that the tiller is spot on but at the same time I feel just a wisp of disappointment that I hadn’t attained the level of performance that I know could be had with better skills and understanding.
Nightfall comes and I settle into the present modern world I live in. I turn on the computer and I read about the work many of my predecessors have done and how they went about doing it. More often than not it may answer a few questions but inevitably create only more questions. I research some of the mathematical formulas used to evaluate a bow and arrow and find ways I can apply them to my research. I can’t wait for the next generation to solve all these problems, I somehow feel driven to see what the final product will look like, it no longer is important who creates the final product, I just want to see what it looks like.
Identifying the problems we are trying to solve is first on the list as there are many.
Why do bows break?
Why do they take set?
Why are some slow and some fast?
How slow is slow and how fast is fast?
These are probably the basic questions we deal with and there are books after books written addressing these issues. My logic is to try and discover techniques that can be incorporated into the process of building a bow that will address these problems as a matter of construction, simple things we can do during the building process that are results driven and will guide us to the final destination. For example the mass principle does not require a scale or any other math once understood, it simply requires monitoring the condition of the wood during the tillering process, and the results will be the same, even better. It addresses moisture, wood quality and design and simply using your eyes and hands will get you to the proper mass and design. Simply developing a deeper understanding of what you are working on is probably as primitive as you can get.
