#5
Post
by Guest » Sun Sep 28, 2003 4:00 am
Mik,
I have had the Archer's Craft for many years. However, you can also find out how it is done in the Traditional Bowyers Bibles as well. It is not particularly difficult to do at all . . . just time consuming.
If you split your feathers with a razor-blade or similarly sharp knife along the groove down the middle of the quill and use the wider side of the flight feather as I explained elsewhere on this site, you then trim the quill on either side of the vane as close as you can with a pair of scissors.
Then you clamp the whole trimmed vane in a fletching clamp (straight) or between two strips of sheet metal of any kind held together with a big bulldog clip. You can hen grind down the pith by gently dragging it over a sheet of sand paper pinned to a piece of flat wood until it is almost gone.
You then decide how much vane length you want and pull off the rest at both ends of the trimmed and ground feather, leaving at least 2cm of quill extending past the vane at both ends.
Next, on your prepared arrow shaft, you mark the arrow ahead of the string nock in 3 places at 120 degrees apart with a faint pencil line as long as your prepared vanes.
Lay your first vane at the cock feather position at the desired position ahead of the nock, and using a slip-knot on a piece of cotton or serving thread, slip it over the shaft and quill extension, pull it tight, wrap it once again firmly to hold it in postion, then lay the next vane in position and repeat the above, and finally the third vane and do the same.
Check that the vanes are equally spaced whilst holding the thread in your teeth (if you've got any), and then continue wrapping the thread over the exposed quill ends until you almost reach the nock, then tie it off as you would string serving.
That leaves the forward portion of the vanes flapping around. Here, you do pretty much the same, but with a difference.
Aligning your vanes on similarly spaced 120 degree marks, you pull the cock vane tight against the shaft and secure it with a slip-knot as above but looped over the shaft from the pointy end. Start the wrapping about 5mm from the front of the quill (There is a reason for this.), but do it in the direction of the curve of the vane (which if you use right wing feathers, it is handy if you are left-handed but awkward if you are not).
Place the second and third vanes in position similarly to what you did to the tail-end of the arrow, ie. place the vane and hold it down with a couple of loops of thread. Hold the thread with your teeth while you move the vanes into position on the line or slightly offset them above the line.
When all 3 vanes are in position, use a pair of pointy-nose pliers to pull the vanes tightly down on the shaft by the extra 5 mm ahead of the wrapping.
When all 3 vanes are in position and tightly secured, continue with the wrapping of the thread until you reach the start of the feather vane and tie off. In a lot of primitive societies, this was all that was done and worked well, except that the vanes bowed away from the shaft in humid weather. It didn't affect arrow flight though.
With the common European/English feather tying, you did as above, but instead of tying off when you reached the start of the vane, you continued up the vane toward the tail by spiralling the thread between the spines of the vane, keeping a firm tension on the thread to hold the quill against the shaft. This is why you wrap in the direction of the curl of the vane. If you go the other way, it won't work and is a bugger of a job.
The spirals were often about 5mm apart.
Continue the spirals until you reach the other end and bring the thread out onto the previous wrapping a short distance and tie it off also. Trim off the excess bits of quill. Your arrow in now fletched.
Apply a waterproof coating to the thread and along the shaftment between the vanes to protect the thread as much as possible. If you succeed in fletching an arrow this way you will completely understand why arrows were so carefully looked after in olden times quite apart from them being the business end of the bow and arrow thing.
There will be unsightly gaps between the spines of the vanes where you have split them with the thread. To improve the neatness of this, wet the vanes with a spray atomiser (such as you spray pot plants) and let them dry or hold them in the steam from a boiling kettle.
By the way, the shaftment is the area of the arrow shaft between the vanes, extending from the forward point of the vanes back to and including the nock.
Let me know how you go.
Dennis La Varenne
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