Hello. Today I decided to tell you about how to make a toy bow for recreational shooting in the country, picnic, etc.
At the very beginning of this article, I want to focus on one very common mistake of "home gunsmiths". Namely: by making "weapons" most are trying to make it the most powerful ...
WHY???!!!
Answer this question for yourself! Will you go hunting with him? I think no! After all, for this you need to get permission, and homemade is illegal ... (And in any case, for hunting it’s better - a firearm ... Because the energy of a shot cannot be compared, ease of use is also ...). Admit it to yourself - you just want to shoot at targets! Truth? And if so - you do not care about power. After all, in order to confidently shoot a bow, you need to have the appropriate physical training!!! Yes, yes, that is why in the old days the archer prepared all his life, starting from childhood: by training he developed certain muscle groups! I also underestimated this factor at first. The first bow was made with a force of 20 kgf. After all, this is not a weapon, even according to the law. It is considered weak... And what is the result?.... I, as a person who is quite physically developed, could shoot from it... a maximum of ten times!... Then - a break for rest... And the women, to For example, they could not once! (Yes, yes, that’s right. After all, even a “pathetic” 20 kgf for a bow is the effort with which you hold two full buckets of water in your hand !!! All your friends will be able to do this within the time sufficient for aiming? And at the same time - without trembling in a tense hand !!!
Agree no!!!
The second point to focus on is the range of aimed fire! It is AIMING. Those who have not shot a bow often imagine that if you look along the arrow, you will get there! But in fact, this is not at all the case: there is practically no direct flight of an arrow - after all, even a bullet flies along a parabola. And an arrow is much, many times heavier than a bullet, and the energy of a bullet is orders of magnitude higher! At the same time, the plumage, passing near the handle of the bow, deflects the flight of the arrow to the side! So archery is conducted "intuitively", based on the experience of hundreds and thousands of shots!
And therefore, if you are not a trained archer athlete, you will be able to shoot at a maximum of 20-30 meters if you want to hit the target meter by meter ....
Let's summarize:
If you want to make a bow from which it will be INTERESTING to shoot campaigns of friends at a picnic in the forest, or in the country - you will have enough effort of 10-15 kgf! Such a bow is capable of throwing a light wooden arrow up to a hundred meters when shooting at an angle of 45 degrees. With aimed shooting, it will provide INTERESTING shooting for amateurs at a distance of up to 30 meters! (At a greater distance, your arrows will still be "disposable" - you will not find them!))) And, at the same time, a light arrow is not so traumatic!
I've been thinking about making one like this for a long time. We often go "on the nature" with a group of friends. In doing so, he set himself several conditions:
1. The bow should be easy to disassemble for ease of transportation
2. It must be strong enough and not be afraid of weather conditions.
3. He shouldn't have great power tension, but, at the same time, it must provide an arrow flight range of at least 30 meters.
So, having shoveled a lot of Internet pages and touched a lot of materials with my hands, I opted for the so-called composite reinforcement. Now it is being widely introduced instead of steel in construction, because it has a great strength and, most importantly for us, flexibility and elasticity..
We will need:
1. Composite reinforcement with a diameter of 8 mm. and a total length of 2m.40 cm.
2. A piece of a profile pipe with a section of 20 by 25 mm, 20 cm long.
3. A piece of plywood 40mm thick. (This one is hard to find, so I glued two pieces of "Finnish phonera, 20 mm thick each) with PVA glue in a vice.)
4. Steel cable, 1 mm in diameter (for making a bowstring)
5. Cable clamps.
6. 2 furniture bolts.
7. Synthetic thick thread.
8. Heat shrink tubing (optional)
So, let's get started ... First, I started making the shoulders. For each shoulder, I used two pieces of reinforcement, 50 cm long, and one, 70 cm long. Putting them together (long in the middle), I wrapped them tightly, coil to coil with synthetic thread
This must be done along the entire length, because, when the shoulder is bent, the armatures must be tightly connected into a single whole.
After that, I impregnated the resulting shoulders with epoxy. (I did not photograph this "sticky" process because of dirty hands.))))
After that, I prepared a heat shrink tube.
I dressed her up and haired her with a hair dryer. This operation is optional - I pursued purely decorative purposes. Perhaps it even reduces the elasticity of the shoulders.
I cut the profile pipe with a "grinder" along. Having measured the middle along the length and made cuts, I folded two boxes, placing them inside the beginning of my shoulders. After that, having drilled holes through, he compressed these boxes with M6 bolts.
Here is what happened after wrapping the structure with electrical tape (for decorative purposes. It was rusty):
So, I have two shoulders:
Looking ahead, I will describe how I made the fastening of the bowstring ... There were different ideas, but in order to temporarily test it, I stepped back from the edge of the shoulders by one and a half cm, wound a "bump" of thin knitting wire, wrapped it all with electrical tape .... .yes, it remains so!)))) The bowstring loop does not pass through it, and that is enough...
Let's start making the handle. It can be made from wood. But, since it will experience enormous loads, do not even think about conifers. Oak, or a birch butt is suitable ... It is difficult to get such wood in urban conditions, so I decided to make a plywood handle ... Since the thickness will be at least three centimeters (preferably 4), I glued two pieces with PVA glue " Finnish plywood, 20 mm thick. You can easily find the shape of the handle on the Internet and choose to your taste - with the right or left arrangement of the shelf for the arrow. After processing the workpiece with a grinder (first with a "toothy" circle on wood, then with an emery-petal), and coloring, I got this handle:
Having drilled one through hole, and one deaf one, I connected the handle to the shoulders with ordinary furniture bolts:
The nut of the bolt, which is used to crimp the metal ends on the shoulders, enters the blind hole and fixes the shoulder in line with the handle. And all this is pulled together with a furniture bolt. At first, I planned to use a wing nut for ease of disassembly and assembly, but in practice, “by hand” effort was not enough for reliable fastening - the shoulders dangled. Therefore, I replaced the nuts with ordinary ones and understaffed the bow with a cheap Chinese ratchet with a 10 mm head.
The next step is the string. I, without further ado, made it from a steel cable with a diameter of 1 mm. On the cable, so as not to cut his hands like that, he put on a thin heat-shrinkable tube of red color. I fastened the loops at the ends with crimps, sold where I bought the cable.
So, I got such a handsome man!
The force, measured using conventional scales, showed that when fully stretched to the length of the arrow, it is equal to 12 kgf. That is, according to the law, this is not a weapon, but a "product that is structurally similar", i.e., a toy!
It remains to ask your daughter to sew a cover on a sewing machine, and the bow is ready! It is very convenient to take with you on picnics. Everyone can shoot from it.
There was an idea to collect a bow from improvised means. With a small tension force, the first training, but still not a children's toy, with normal arrows, for an inexperienced person, can be dangerous. The bow turned out as part of the sports equipment, I will not hunt with it, except for cardboard boxes with circles.
I'll show you what happened in the end, and how many kilograms of string tension. In general, I will write a little about what happened and how it was used.
The material for the shoulders was fiberglass reinforcement and epoxy resin. I bought fittings in a household store (I think I took 6 mm, I don’t remember exactly, I did it a year and a half ago). The thicker the armature, in theory, the bow will be stronger, that is, the tension force of the bowstring is higher.
The fittings are stored in a bay or a roll, a roll, a coil, so it is not completely flat, but bends a little. cut off the twigs as in the photo, 4 long, 2 a little shorter. the long ones were about 80 cm. then he folded them on a flat surface, pressing them down with washers, bars, particles of a young star, so that they lay flat and motionless.
I smeared a little with epoxy, along the edge, so that they would hold on and wrapped them with nylon thread ...
Then he began to fill these blanks with epoxy with the addition of some kind of nail paint and sparkles stolen from his wife.
You can use any, you can not do this at all. in general, little by little began to fill and achieve such a result.
After filling it all, I realized that in a good way it was necessary to do this either on a board with a separator, or wrap the board with a film or a bag, in general with polyethylene, the resin reluctantly sticks to it. Filled and the process of sanding began, began to level, re-fill, again level. By the way, sanding glass fittings indoors without a respirator or at least a gauze mask is not best idea, small particles of glass dust fly and are perfectly inhaled with air. Having finished with the shoulders, we make cuts in them at the edges, for the bowstring.
Why is the central stick shorter?! In order for the edges of the shoulder to be thinner, as in the photo, and accordingly to bend, when the bowstring is pulled, not the entire shoulder, but first the edge. I finished making the shoulders, but I missed one thing. My bowstring eye looked like this.
And after some manipulations it became so.
I, having already collected the bow completely and shot a little, rubbed the bowstring in the ear. Didn't finish the edges. Then I shortened the shoulders a little by cutting off a little from the top and bottom. They became shorter by 10 centimeters. On the new, not sawn ends of the shoulder, I wound a polyester belt, or a nylon one, it doesn’t really matter, wound it abundantly lubricating each layer with epoxy. And from above, the resulting ball was filled with epoxy, in short, epoxy was generally everywhere. After solidification, I gave it such a shape as it turned out at the end. And now I have processed the edges so that there are no sharp edges. Only now the photo is not left from those processes.
Next we move on to the handle. I took a bar of 50 mm in a household store a long time ago. The seller assured that it was white ash. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but the tree is strong, it’s difficult to cut with an electric jigsaw with a large file. I drew a freehand sketch on graph paper (there is no photo left) and then transferred it to a beam and cut it out.
From the ends I marked out the approximate thickness and also everything with a jigsaw, cutting off everything superfluous.
In some places, the jigsaw file was crookedly "walking". Well, it doesn't matter, we'll fix it later. Then a belt grinder went into action .... yeah, it’s not there, so we buy it in the same household store, with large sandpaper, as much as possible, and files. And we begin to grind the pinocchio-handle. Of course, I didn’t take a photo of this either - I was covered in sawdust and dust.
When time passes, if you do not do as I wanted to do (douse gasoline on this shapeless piece of wood that you can work with horseradish and burn it with sinister laughter). If we have carved it, then we try it on.
Yeah, with the help of blue electrical tape and nylon thread we make a semblance of an onion and rejoice like a little one. Next, we align the center line of the temporary bowstring with the center of the handle and specifically the shelves for the arrow. We fix the shoulders and drill two holes with a drill for wood or I drilled for metal (epoxy shoulders are drilled with a bang). holes at 6 and, accordingly, insert the bolts and washers at 6. and fix the whole thing.
And then WARNING. If you have a drilling machine, then that's great. I drilled with a regular drill. And here the truth is "Measure seven times - cut one." It is worth moving the axis a little and the bow will shoot in the wrong direction. Not much but still. I had a stool drill and an assistant, and it seemed to work out, so you can do it too. We take long bolts, put a washer on the bolt, insert it with back side we pass the handles over the shoulder, on top of the same wide washer, engraver and nut, or like my lambs. And we pull.
Well, everything seems to be ok. Then I smeared the entire handle with a thin layer of epoxy, instead of varnish.
Do not judge strictly. There is not much information on the Internet about this, I show how I did it. I'm not saying that this is correct - I did it for the first time and could make mistakes. I'm just showing you what happened.
Outdoor recreation with friends can be diversified not only by gatherings, rich fish soup and playing the guitar, but also by exciting shooting from the cold throwing weapons or pneumatics. If you don’t have, or don’t have enough money to buy, or, it doesn’t matter - you can do everything yourself. In today's article, we will look at how it is possible with shoulders made of elastic composite reinforcement. Like composite bow quite simple to manufacture, but at the same time, it has good power for game shooting at targets. The author of this design, in his explanations, claims that when measuring the tension force of the bowstring, he got a result of 12 kgf. This is very good for a bow designed for target shooting on vacation.
Which can fill up a boar, we do not need. Firstly, the guardians of the law will give you a hat for this, and secondly, we didn’t come to hunt, but just to relax in nature, having fun with archery along the way. And, thirdly, you get tired of shooting from powerful bow due to normal muscle fatigue. You will make a dozen shots, and spit on this “hard” occupation, deciding that a fishing rod is still preferable to you than archery. Well, from a lighter version of the bow, target shooting will be just pure pleasure. From such a home-made collapsible bow, you can easily conduct aimed shooting at targets at a distance of up to thirty meters. Well, we don't need more.
How to make a bow with limbs made of composite materials
So, to make a bow, we need to purchase several pieces of composite plastic reinforcement with a diameter of eight millimeters. First we will make the shoulders of the bow. For one shoulder, it is necessary to saw off three pieces of reinforcement. Two segments are fifty centimeters long, and one is seventy centimeters long. We connect these segments of composite reinforcement together by tightly wrapping them with synthetic thread, and the long segment should be in the middle.
After you wrap the armature with a thread along the entire length, impregnate the winding with epoxy glue and put a heat shrink tube on top. Shrink the tube with a building hair dryer. You now have a solid bow arm made from three pieces of resilient plastic.
Now you need to place these shoulders in a metal block, with which we will attach them to the bow handle. A metal block can be made from a piece of a profile pipe, the size of which is 20 by 25 mm and a length of 20 cm. We cut the pipe with a “grinder” along into two halves. In the middle we make cuts and fold the box.
We drill two holes in the block and, having inserted the end of the shoulder into it, tighten it with a bolt and nut. We wrap it with electrical tape to give the profile block a more aesthetic look. At the end of the shoulder, it is necessary to make a slight thickening for attaching the bowstring. We wind a layer of wire, stepping back from the edge of the shoulder one and a half centimeters. We wrap the end of the shoulder with electrical tape. You will get a ledge that will prevent the bowstring from slipping off your shoulder when pulling the bow.
After both shoulders are ready, you can begin to make the bow handle. She, the author of this bow design, was made of thick plywood. It is necessary to glue together two tiles of plywood twenty centimeters thick. Then draw a template for the handle and cut it with a jigsaw. You can process the handle at your discretion, the main thing is not to forget to cut out the shelf for the arrow. After final processing and grinding, the handle can be painted.
Next, two holes must be drilled at the ends of the handle. One hole should be through, the other deaf. Everything, you can collect onions. We fasten the shoulders to the handle with the help of furniture bolts. The blind hole in the handle is designed for the end of the bolt with which we pulled the shoulder mount block.
A thin heat shrink tube can be put on the middle of the bowstring to prevent damage to the fingers when firing a bow.In general, this is where our work on making a bow with shoulders from composite reinforcement is completed. It remains to make arrows.
How to quickly make an arrow for a bow
For game shooting made even easier. An ordinary window glazing bead is taken and inserted at one end into an electric drill. We fix the turning die of the desired diameter in a vice. We turn on the drill and drive the bead through the die. We should get a perfectly even shaft for the arrow. We sharpen the end of the shaft and dip it in epoxy glue, or furniture varnish. Such a tip, after drying, can easily pierce plastic bottle or stick into a tree. It remains using ordinary tape. We glue two pieces of adhesive tape together, putting the end of the arrow in the middle. We cut out the necessary plumage configuration with scissors. At the end of the arrow we make a small slot for the bowstring. Everything, you can conduct the first tests on shooting from our homemade bow.