Hah! It’s been so long since my last blog post I’ll bet you thought I’d dropped off the edge of the earth! Far from it, although it may sometimes seem that way.
We have survived our move to the California high desert.

Anaheim, the home of Disneyland, had just gotten too costly to live in. Now we’ve found a little house on a dirt road in Lucerne Valley, CA. It’s a big adjustment, especially for Fayme. We don’t have a garbage disposal, dish washer, or clothes dryer. Not having those things is livable but we also don’t have a good internet connection or a garage, and those two things are more difficult to do without. We’ve had to go back to a dial-up internet connection and it’s just about worthless. I’m hoping that the local phone provider gets more ports for DSL in the area before too long… but to tell the truth, I’m not holding my breath.

The lack of a garage has been a little easier to rectify. We arranged to rent a couple containers and had them plopped on the back yard. Originally we tried to do with just one but we ended up having too much stuff. Now we have his and hers storage containers that will also double as workshops and studios.

It’s been an interesting adjustment to move out here. Lucerne Valley isn’t a very large town and while there is a post office, a pretty fair grocery store, a couple feed stores, two hardware stores, and a western gift shop, there isn’t a whole lot more. Luckily, the towns of Apple Valley and Victorville aren’t very far away and they have pretty much any store we’d need… except Trader Joe’s and Lee’s Sandwich… c’mon, guys!

One of the first questions I’ve been asked is if I have air conditioning in my new desert home. Actually, air conditioning gets too costly so most folks have evaporative coolers, aka swamp coolers. It’s been pretty mild since we got here so we haven’t had a chance to see how well ours works but I think it will make those hot desert days bearable. What’s actually been of more concern has been staying warm. For those folks not familiar with the desert, it can get bone chilling cold at night. We’ve been experiencing the same unexpected cold temperatures the rest of southern California has in the last few weeks and it’s been butt cold out here. We’ve even gotten a little bit of snow a couple times. Our heat is coming from a small wood burning stove in the living room. Through a gracious donation of free firewood from friends Ken and Barbara, and Jim and Carol, we have this little stove doing its duty. It works pretty well but it’s not a fancy model with blowers and heat exchangers so the heat doesn’t extend very far past the living room. The bedrooms and kitchen are still a bit chilly. That’s fine for me as I sleep well when the air is cold but poor Fayme looks like an explorer of the frozen north as she gets bundled up to go to bed.

We’re being met with some different challenges since moving out here. Not long after we moved in there were some high winds coming off the mountains behind us. After securing everything in the yard we thought we’d be ok. After a little while we discovered that things we thought secured or too heavy to be affected by the wind were actually blowing around and fetching up against the fence. While collecting those items I happened to glance up at the roof of the house and saw that a section of roofing material had peeled back from the wind. This is heavy composite roof material and it had been well nailed, I’ll let your imagination run on how heavy the wind was. Anyway, I don’t have a ladder high enough to get to the roof so I backed the truck up to the house and stood a kitchen step stool on the tailgate to reach high enough to fold the torn material back to its rightful place and I put a couple un-split firewood logs on it to hold it down. Done deal, right? Well, ten minutes later I heard those logs being rolled around on the roof by the wind gusts. This time when I backed the truck up and climbed on the stepstool I put enough firewood logs on the ripped section that I was concerned about having enough left to heat the house.

The roof is all fixed now and I don’t think this will happen again but I can tell you that this was certainly unexpected.

We still have boxes everywhere as we unpack and try to find a home for all this stuff we have accumulated over time. I can see that the local charities will have some donations from us and we’ll also be having a yard sale or three. eBay and the local Craig’s List may also have a few listings placed.

But the good news is we are here, we survived the move, and I’m ready to get back to making great arrows!

The Greenman Archery website has my new contact phone number if anyone would like to chat about arrows. I can also be emailed through the address there or you can simply use greenmanarrows@gmail.com to catch me. Our internet connection is dial-up now so if you try to call and get a busy signal, my apologies, either Fayme or I are probably on-line waiting impatiently for a page to load.

The view from our backyard. Is this place beautiful or what?

Thanks for reading and happy archery!

After this experience I recommend you never move. But if you do, Home Depot has good prices on moving boxes.

Update!

Fayme has saved my bacon.
She found a page that details how to add another author to the blog and then tells how to delete the original author.

But holy crap was that a pain in the ass!

I'm still not very happy with Google but at least now I'm not ready to scourge them from the face of the earth.

This May Be My Last Post... unless you can help me

As some of my readers know, I am in the midst of moving my home and shop.
The area we are moving to does not support the email address I have been using to access the Blogger forums: guy.taylor@sbcglobal.net I get this address through having ATT as my phone and internet service connection and they don't cover the new place.
I am trying to add a new email address (greenmanarrows@gmail.com) to the system and Google, the owner of the Blogger system, is just fighting me every step of the way. The system has even gone so far as to tell me that I can not use a gmail address with a Google service. Pretty freakin' odd since gmail is Google.

Please... if anyone has an answer for what I can do I would so very much appreciate it.
I've tried emailing Google but their system is so big and self-important that everything gets refered to help pages... and we all know how useful those can be. There appears to be no way to actually contact Google. Pretty outstanding customer service there.

Working Harder - Not Smarter... wait... what?

I'm putting together some Flemish string boards to have available for sale at upcoming events I'll be at. At the SCA event, Great Western War in October I'll be giving ongoing Flemish bowstring demonstrations in my booth. Having the string board available for folks to purchase only makes sense.
The back of these boards has a bit of helpful information printed on paper and laminated to the board. When I did the lamination a bit of ink smeared on the paper, but it wasn't too bad so I went ahead and did all of them. When I brushed on the first coat of protective finish a little more ink smeared, it didn't look good but I went ahead and did all of them.
Well, afterwards I looked at these things and decided I'd need to start all over again, they looked horrible. I figured it wouldn't be too difficult to sand the finish and paper off with some 60 grit sandpaper and a vibratory sander.

It turned out to be much more difficult than I expected.
The lamination glue and the finish I used over the paper combined to gum up the sandpaper into unusability very quickly.

 

 

Trying to figure out how I was going to get this stuff taken off I decided to try the trusty Shinto Rasp. Bob's your uncle, we got going in the right direction.

 

The Shinto Rasp took things down pretty fast and without the blade getting gummed up. The long length of the rasp let me use it almost like a surface plane and I had no difficulties keeping the board flat with no spots where the tool dug into the wood.
From this point it was quick work to use a cabinet scraper for a final touch-up before hitting the surface with the vibrating sander.

Yeah, the idea is to work smarter, not harder. But occasionally when things don't work out as you want them to you've got to do a little bit more work to get things headed back in the right direction.

Lessons learned here are:
When the ink smears... STOP!
The Shinto Rasp rocks!



Happy archery, and Flemish bowstring making!

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!