Three of our regular members came along to the first Bow making workshop. We had a fantastic day working under the shade of the trees.
After an initial introductory talk covering the history and styles of bows we went off to look for suitable saplings. Finding nothing suitable we returned to base and decided to use the kiln dried staves I had brought along.
Marc decided to continue the bow he had started on a previous day. This was a short longbow made from an Ash sapling.

Here he is with the bow on the tillering stick.

Phil decided to make a tradtional English Longbow from one of my Ash staves. This meant lots of sawing of tapers.

Kim decided that he liked the look of the ancient paddle bow examples I had brought along and decided to make a Mere Heath copy out of the Elm stave. Again lots of sawing was required!.

Once the tapers had been cut Kim moved onto the spokeshave to thin out the paddles.

While Phil was still cutting his tapers!

Meantime Mark was doing final finishing and testing his bow.

A VERY happy man

Unfortunatly time caught up with us as neither Phil or Kim managed completed their bows, but both said they would continue to work on them at home and bring them back for strings and tillering.

To round off the day and have a bit of fun we all made bamboo bows as featured in the Spring ’09 magazine.