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in reply to: Hardwood shafts? #61813
Dave,
One other data point for your wood-FOC-breakage consideration: early this season I shot one of our little arKansas whitetail does with a Sitka Spruce 50-55 spine and a 200 grain Grizzly out of my home made ERC selfbow. Hit it just slightly forward…and watched my shaft break right behind the head. She was essentially unharmed, although I was pretty sick with myself. First time I’ve had anything but perfect results using the moderately heavy heads and SS.
Since then, I have shot an 8 point and a nice doe with the same set up, and it looked like I threw a hatchet through them. Short, copious blood trail and quick clean recovery. I’m still undecided due to that one break. But, I have also decided that I might have damaged that shaft at some point and will keep shooting them as is for the time being.
in reply to: Wow! My first deer with a bow! #58332Nice!! What do you think of those hickory shafts? Did you find a supplier or mill them yourself? I’m looking for the heaviest, toughest wood shaft I can find. Nice looking bit of meat there!!
in reply to: Found some venison… #57900ERC is a actually a type of juniper, hence why it does make a very good bow. It’s tough to find a good piece though. I have been actively looking and not found another that I wanted to try and work with. That particular piece has many knots in it, but they don’t go all the way through to the back. I just smoothed them off on the belly side. ERC typically needs to be backed with something such as rawhide or sinew. A very thin hickory backing can work, but if it’s very thick the back will overpower the belly and cause compression issues.
There is a guy over on the Primitive forum who drilled out the knots and filed them with osage orange pins. That gave his bow a really neat touch and prevented the problem of the knots crumbling and causing a weak spot over time.
If you do try ERC, make it fairly long and fairly wide. It’s a great wood, but is relatively tension weak, so needs to be long/wide, and usually backed with something. It is a great wood though. It’s very light in physical weight itself, so it shoots harder per pound of draw weight than you might expect. That bow pulls around 50 pounds, but shoots faster than my other 50 pound bows of red oak, elm, hackberry, etc. (Of course, that could be due to something I did wrong on the others that I managed to escape on this one. I dunno for sure.)
in reply to: Found some venison… #57481It’s an Eastern Redcedar (a type of juniper actually) that my uncle cut to clear out a walking trail on his land a couple years ago. I happened to notice it as I was walking back from hunting and asked would he mind if I tried to coax a bow out of it. He didn’t mind, so I took it home and spent the next ten months dithering about it and taking a few scrapes here and there. Finally sometime last Augustish I put three straight full days into. Took off about an inch or so of sapwood so that there would be some of that beautiful red heartwood left after tillering (You can get whitewood anywhere, but that red sapwood is hard to come by.), backed it with rawhide, and tillered it to #52 lbs at 28″. It’s 66″ long tip to tip and shoots really well. This is my second year hunting with it and it’s shot several thousand arrows with no additional set at all. Got a couple does with it last year and some assorted small game. I’ve made several other decent bows, but that one is my favorite by far.
in reply to: Found some venison… #57329Not terribly long. Maybe 50-60 yards. Average. I’ve had one that was no blood trail. Just a couple steps, a confused look, and a flop. Had one a couple years ago that was around half a mile. That was brutal, took all night, and some inductive reasoning to find once the actual droplets faded out. But most are about like this: spotty/splotchy with periods of light drops and usually under a hundred yards.
in reply to: Book Recommendation #52486Lots of good suggestions on here. I would add “Coyote: Defiant Songdog of the West.” Again, it’s not specifically a hunting theme, though hunting plays a substantial role. It is thought provoking. On that same vein in the Ruark line, “Something of Value” is very good, if graphic. Though written in the ’50s, there is some possible application to our current state of affairs in certain sandy locations overseas, as well as being a neat hunting yarn for the first half or so.
Any of the several books by/about Mr. Bear are well worth reading. “Ishi and Elvis” by Jim Hamm is an excellent blend of bowhunting mixed with land use, ethics, and colorful characters with some nice turns of phrase.
I’m not being a wise guy here, but I could someone here, with whom I obviously share similar thoughts, attitudes, and ideas, please explain to me the attraction of London’s “To Build a Fire”? I have hated that story for twenty years. An idiot ignores good advice and gets himself dead. The end.
Again, I’m not being a smartalek. I’ve never discussed it with anyone from the bowhunting community. I’ve read it myself several times to see if it would grow on me (some other literature has), and discussed it in literature courses with non-hunter types, but whatever it is that makes that particular piece appealing continues to elude me. I am curious if the perspective from a like-minded person might help illumine this story for me.
in reply to: How to deal with mosquitoes? #46448http://www.ext.colostate.edu/safefood/newsltr/v8n1s07.html
Interesting anyway. I used garlic supplements at Ft. Drum.
in reply to: What are your plans? #28566I can hunt on my own place, one another property about a half hour away, and all over oodles of public land. So pretty much any day that has light and ends in Y is a potential hunt or two, and I’ll get in some sort of “hunt” on most of them. That may be as casual as a walk with a bow, but usually it will be at least fairly serious with the intent to get some meat. Got a couple of weekend-plus trips planned and there are usually one or two more that pop up. It’ll be a good year, one way or the other.
in reply to: Trad-Bow arrow speed & KE #24499Make a really heavy arrow, put a sharp head on it, make sure you can hit with it, and send the rest of that mumbo-jumbo back to Cabelas.
in reply to: Looking for Staves in Colorado #24495I was gonna say “When did they pop out 5 and 6?!!?” 😉 But yes, the TBB series is fantastic. Volumes I and IV are the best for getting started. The middle two both have some cool stuff in them, but are specific to certain types of archery and whatnot. More like a how-to-history rather than a pure nuts and bolts. Vol IV would probably be best if you can grab just one.
That said, I’ll add a second reccomendation for the Lowe’s/Home Depot/your local lumber yard here for sourcing red oak boards. They won’t have very many good ones at any one time, but you’re likely to find a couple that will work.
You might look at this sitehere… It’s got some good take aways in it.
in reply to: My first kill with a bow #18935Rabbits are great fun. And you’re in the best part of the world. The Nocking Point is still my favorite shop. Tell Mike that “Dan from down in Manhattan” said hi next time you’re in there. I miss that country. Nice shootin’!
in reply to: Best account of true archery in Disney History #50607They nailed it. I showed that to my daughter. May have to take her to see it.
in reply to: Feather???? What Feathers!!!! #43875You guys have spent wayyyy too much time building this thread, but it’s freakin’ hilarious and I thank you for it.
in reply to: who carrys a backup gun #40354If I were to carry one here in Arkansas (and I often do on a day-to-day basis), it would be more for the meth lab idiots than the wild critters. Usually don’t when I am hunting, though it depends where I am. Sometimes, in the backwoods, I do.
in reply to: new to traditional #32387Sounds fine to me. Sure not too heavy.
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