Progression of bowmaking, and making bowstrings

Tweet

So now I've been back at the archery as a hobby for a little over a year now. Selling archery products, as I may have mentioned, was part of the family business (the other part was, as I said, giving dogsled rides, making dogsledding equipment, and giving canoe trips). Over the last year, I've made a whole lot of bows. Some better then others. But I've progressed from making pvc bows, to making wooden bows, to making wood laminate bows, to even using fiberglass. And now I'm actually happy that some of my bows are performing (almost) as nice as my one Martin Recurve-impact testing, some of them are getting as much penetration...but they still don't look as pretty as I would like. But that is coming along too. Over the last year as well, the arrows have improved, and there is another part that I picked up... Making bowstrings. I had to learn to do this out of sheer frustration. For the one recurve I had to have a string custom made (oddly no one was carrying a 58 inch string at the local shops)...I had it ordered from a reputable company which I have been familiar with for some years (we used to carry their products, and I knew the owner personally)...and within half an hour of shooting with the new string, the serving began to come loose. And it stretched 5 inches. Um, those are VERY bad things. New strings always stretch a little...but 5 inches is far too much. The stretch also was a factor in the rest of the serving unraveling as well (it's hard to explain that in text...). I was not pleased. At all. Even giving that a person may complain to the manufacturer about a bad product and get a replacement or their money back (some will and some won't), that still leaves you with the practical issue that those things still can go wrong. So, I learn to make my own bow strings. And though again they are not as pretty or nice looking as the others, performance wise they are holding up better. For a fraction of the cost. 50 cents as opposed to 30 dollars. Putting that another way...50 cents for something that works, as opposed to 30 dollars for something that does not work. The entire process has also made me a little more intelligent when it comes to looking at products as well. All of this has been very time consuming, very frustrating, a little expensive at times...but also, huge amounts of fun. On stressful days, even the "frustration" is a wonderful destressor and break from one's day to day things.