Arrow Sale at GreenmanArchery.com

Ok, folks. I've got some stock arrows that I'm tired of looking at! Let's get these puppies to some new homes.

I'm offering 10% off the listed price on arrows that I have already made. These are good arrows I just want to get them out so I can make room for some new designs.
You can see these arrows by going to the Greenman Archery web page and clicking on the Available Items button on the left side.
Or, just go straight to the Available Items page in one click.

Here is a sample of just some of the available arrows, please see the page for individual specs...

Hapy Archery and thanks for looking!

Well... That Didn't Work!

We had our monthly Pasadena Gathering today.
This is a once a month gathering of friends and interested individuals who gather at the Pasadena Roving Archers range in Pasadena, CA to work on bowmaking and other primitive-type skills.
Today we had some new attendees wanting to make a bow so we got them set up and going. All three women made great strides before their schedules called them away. I suspect that they'll be able to finish their bows the next time they visit.

Last night I was loading things to take into my truck and found an almost completed bow that I didn't recognize at all. I don't know who gave it to me or even what kind of wood it was made from. It looked to be really close to finished so I tossed it into the truck to see what I could do with it.
Once I got started on the bow at the range I rounded all the corners before bending the limbs and then put it on Ken's tillering tree to see how things looked. One limb was stronger than the other so I went at it with a cabinet scraper to bring it into line.
A couple more trips to the tiller tree, some more scraping with the scraper and it wasn't looking too bad. Weight was going to be low, maybe 20-25# so I thought I'd either give it away or hang on to it for a loaner.
While I was exercising the bow by pulling it to draw and letting it back down it suddenly went BANG and I got whacked across the forehead, nose, and mouth with flying wood pieces.
The first thing I asked when a couple guys turned around was, "am I bleeding?"
When you get whacked so suddenly like that you can't always tell just how hard you got hit so I wanted to know if I should start worrying or not.
Turns out that I was fine so we looked at the bow. It broke right on the back of the bow and the only thing we can figure is that it just wasn't bow wood. We never did figure out what kind of wood it really was.

O, well. It was still a great day spent with great people doing a great activity.
And since I've still got both eyes and all my teeth after getting whacked by the broken bow... it's all good!

Happy Archery!

Future Bow

At the Western States Traditional Rendezvous shoot a few weeks ago in Petaluma, CA I managed to pick up a couple freshly cut yew logs from Dan of Wapiti Archery who came down from Oregon.
Ken Villars did a splitting demo for interested parties using one of the logs so I came home with two freshly split staves and one log.

Ken graciously offered to cut the log on his bandsaw so I passed it to him at the following Pasadena gathering and should be getting the resulting staves back on the 15th at the next gathering.

Looking for something to do this past Saturday at an SCA event I decided to debark one of the split staves and reduce the width a bit to speed the drying.
I don't normally get to work green wood because the balance of the wood I get has already dried. Wow, was it ever a pleasure to work this yew!

I recently got a neat little drawknife at an old tool swapmeet and this is the first chance I've had to use it. This new drawknife turned out to be a wonderful tool for gently removing the stave's bark without going too deep and gouging into the sapwood.
For serious wood removal I'll stick with the full size drawknife but when it gets to the delicate stuff this new guy is Bob's uncle.

As is common when I do work like this at an SCA event, I fielded a lot of questions about what I was doing. Folks are used to seeing event participants sew, weave, spin yarn, and do other somewhat portable activities. But setting up the shavehorse and then making a big mess like I did always brings folks over to chat.

Today I gave the freshly exposed back of the stave a coat of polyurethane to keep the wood from losing moisture too quickly. I'll put the stave in my custom hotbox (the interior of my truck's shell) and keep an eye on it.
I'm looking forward to working with this wood and I hope my skills are up to the task.

Many thanks to Fayme for taking a break from face painting and teddy bear juggling to get these pictures of me. My hands were otherwise occupied.

Happy Archery!