RAWHIDE

[trash one]

Does anybody know how to go about preparing a hide for rawhide backing a bow. Do you salt it or not before letting it dry? Do you dehair it before drying and what process do you go through to dehair the hide?Or does anybody know if there is a book around about what to do. We have plenty of access to hide so thats not a problem, it's just what to do that is.

CATCH YA

BUTCH

[erron]

Mate,

before you spend dollars on books, check out this site:

http://groups.msn.com/ferretsarcheryweb ... cking.msnw

it should give you the basics.



Cheers,

Erron

[trash one]

Thanks Erron
CATCH YA
BUTCH

[Timo]

The first rawhide I did,was by scraping the flesh side clean, then soaking in water until the hair slipped,then just scraping it off with ease. Stretched it and let dry.Stunk something terrible, but yeilded very little waste ,and a good clean hide.

The second one I did,was with the method mentioned above, and I really butchered it up! Didn't have the right tool for cutting off the hair I guess?The hide has a lot of thick and thin spots in it.

[Dennis La Varenne]

Butch,

This reply is a bit late, but I will contact Hans Joachim Stein about de-hairing. He does it quite often as well as scraping hides.

I know that he uses a paste made from wood ash mixed with water which he spreads over the hair side. It loosens it and then it is scraped off. Apparently, it is the Potash in ash which does the job.

Also, if you dry a hide without salting it, the hair will slip out anyway which you would already know, I suppose.

Before that however, the flesh, fat and selvage is all scraped from the inside of the hide and it is stretched and pegged out to dry as I understand the process.

You probably know this, but for the sake of others who may look at this post and want to try it, backing a bow with rawhide adds absolutely nothing to its performance. It is only used to prevent splinters lifting on the back of the bow and breaking. It is also used if growth rings have been cut through or the back has been compromised in any other way.

If the back of a selfbow is sound, rawhiding does nothing.

I have used Kangaroo rawhide which is quite thin and much stronger than cattle rawhide for the same weight, but it is not white like that used over the sapwod on Yew selfbows in North America and sometimes in England.

Rawhiding was invented by early American archers belonging to the United Archers of Philadelphia in the 1830s.

Dennis La Varenne

[trash one]

Thanks Dennis
I was thinking of having a go at making a self bow,I had thought that I would back it, I have access to roo goat bullock hide aswell as roo sinew, it sounds the sinew might be the go.
Jo and I will be down your neck of scrub in the next couple of weeks.
CATCH YA
BUTCH

[Dennis La Varenne]

Butch,

Re sinew, unless you are going to make a very very short bow of about 40 to 50 inches long, such as an American Plains Indian style or one of the Pacific Coast broad flatbow styles and you are prepared to keep your drawlength to about 24 inches maximum, forget sinew also.

If you want a long draw on very very short bow using sinew, you will need to make a Turkish or Eastern European style recurve with stiff non-working 'ears' called siyahs. These act as levers on the end of the bow. A wood belly on this kind of bow will probably not be up to the huge compression strain which is why they used NT buffalo horn like fibreglass on the belly. It takes about 15 times the compression that wood will take.

The sinew was used because on this kind of short bow it allowed long drawlengths, long cast and high speed. On normal man-length bows it is also a waste of time, considerable effort and messy because sinew weighs more than the wood. Adding weight to wood bows only slows them down. It will make them a bit less breakable, but unless there is a lot of sinew which pulls the bow around into a lot of reflex, there will not be any benefit at all.

It is really about understanding the engineering involved.

Unless sinew is used within the limits of its traditional uses, there is not much to gain for the effort. Tim Baker and Paul Comstock have a bit to say on the subject in the Traditional Bowyers' Bibles if you want to do a bit of reading up. Jay Massey, when he was alive liked using it on his short recurved bows too.

You will probably find that if you use some of the native woods you have in your area of Mt Isa and steam in about 2 or 3 inches of reflex if it is not there already, you will do just as well.

By all means, have a go if you want to experiment though, but don't expect miracles. Sinew is very over-rated.

Give us a bell if you get down here, won't you?

Re selfbows; a bow with any kind of backing is generally not regarded as a selfbow in 'primitive' circles.

A selfbow is a bow whose principal working parts (limbs, and handle) are made from a single material. If it is made using a non-naturally occuring backing or facing of any kind, it is a composite bow. A lot of people have this misconception.

Around the world, most people seem to allow a Yew English style bow with rawhide backing in that category because the backing does not improve performance. That seems to be the only exception for some reason.

Dennis La Varenne