I would encourage anyone remotely interested to take lessons before you start practicing on your own to prevent bad habits or to prevent from hurting your fingers/hands/shoulders. Trainers should have light-weight bows, around 16# or so for you to try. Etsy is a good place to buy accessories (tabs, quivers, gloves, rings, etc.).
I've bought arrows/bows from these folks and really like what I received:
https://www.szimeiszterbows.hu/
And for less expensive carbon arrows, I have a few different sets from https://linkboyarchery.com/. Really good stuff.
Lancasterarchery.com is a US-based outfit that has a variety of good equipment.
I find it pretty gratifying and I'm not even going into those videos to learn what they are specifically doing most of the time, but still often I'll pick up a technique or two.
My selfbow staves (four of them in case I fuck them up or want to try again) are currently in my friends garage over by the furnace drying, it's kinda the biggest bummer to making your own bow step 2 (1. Acquire a stave 2. Wait for it to dry (for many months probably)).
If you're going the laminate route do yourself a favour and buy some pre-laminated wood designed for the pressures a bow needs to take. The results of laminate cracking and splintering near your eye don't really bear thinking about.
When you pull a bow, you're putting a significant amount of potential energy into it. Your back and arms do work that becomes tension in the limbs of the bow. When you fire an arrow, most of that energy goes into propelling the arrow down range. The bow is designed to do this. If there is no arrow, that energy has to go somewhere. Typically, it goes into vibrations that the bow is not designed to handle. This can cause delamination, cracks or even catastrophic failure in your face.
Just because a bow survives one dry fire doesn't mean it'll survive two or three or more. A bow that has been dry fired is not safe to use and needs to be checked out.
[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/13499/13499-h/13499-h.htm#2I...
Enthusiasts will pay eyebrow raising amounts for custom ones from a shop with an impressive reputation for something that was the height of 1950s technology.
Great stuff, and the videos they put out are outstanding as well. The one about veneering a column is highly worth watching and illustrates the advantages of an animal protein glue in a real application.
Even the Neanderthals knew how to make certain kinds of glue, which were used for instance for attaching spear-points to spears.
There should be clear links to the class and how to sign up. I know this isn't a marketing page, but there's plenty of people who would gladly pay money to do this supervised. This seems like an ideal father-son activity with a teenager for summer break.
Less than an hour shaping with a plane and a knife used as a scraper I had a pretty good longbow.
Seemed that laminated bamboo is fairly forgiving, and capable of some serious deflection making a powerful bow.
Next, a crossbow, though I am wary of that much stored energy with a trivial trigger.
Although I've only shot the bow a handful of times, it's always been a really fulfilling experience.
The full title is, "The Archer's Craft; a Sheaf of Notes on Certain Matters Concerning Archers and Archery, the making of archers' Tackle and the Art of Hunting with the Bow" and the author is Adrian Eliot Hodgkin.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3977436-the-flat-bow
(having read a number of his other books)
https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/paleoplanet69529/decurve-ref...
