Archery arts and crafts
There are so many practical skills related to archery, and I find it fascinating and satisfying. The archery master at our club actually made a bowstring a couple of months back (I was very impressed), and today one of the girl at the club offered to show me how to use the arrow straightening tool in case any of my aluminium arrows ended up a bit battered at some stage.
This isn't a very clear picture, alas, but you can see the blue metal jig that can be adjusted for different lengths etc to make a bowstring for a recurve bow. There really is an art to it, down to (eventually) winding the extra layers on the section where you grasp and pull back the bowstring differently for left- and right-handers. It becomes an individualised, customised task rather than a mass production exercise when you do it by hand.
Today was a fun arts and crafts day for me because I assembled my gorgeous new aluminium core carbon fibre arrows - which meant I had to glue on the fletches,
knocks and arrowheads.
Here's my setup (photo to the right), you can see the carbon arrow shafts, packets of orange fletches and knocks, metal arrowheads, and a tube of fast setting but flexible glue called 'fletch-tite' (I learned that superglue is too brittle and can come apart more easily under impact). There's also another metal jig and some large metal clips in the box - see, I knew there are lots of reasons for engineers to like archery.
Put knocks into one end of the arrow shafts, and then set the knocks in place in the
lower half of the jig. Put one of the fletches into a metal clip so that the bottom of the fletch just peeps out, run a bead of fletch-tite along the edge of the fletch, and then the metal clip slots precisely into place in the jig so that the fletch is just pressed against the arrow shaft and is held there while the glue sets.
Why does this matter? It's all about repeatable processes again. You want the fletches to line up at the same distance from the bottom of the arrow, and they also need to be spaced 120 degrees apart. The holder at the base of the jig where the arrow sits rotates in clicks of 60 degrees each. Take off the clip when the first fletch is stuck on firmly, rotate two clicks, apply the next fletch and they all end up properly positioned.
Well, there is an art to it... I had to remove and re-stick a coupe of fletches when I slipped, and I ended up with a bunch of glue smears here and there. And on my fingers. And on the table. But I will get better with practice. ;-) I did learn some of the secrets though, like the flick of the wrist to avoid long strings of glue stretching everywhere, and the extra little dab of glue at the top of each fletch just to hold it that little bit more securely, and tucking the lid of the glue into the palm of your hand so that you get the lid on again in the shortest possible time. Hah - I just realised that all the technique secrets are about the glue!
Here they are in the quiver, waiting for the glue to cure completely. I'm looking forward to trying them out next weekend!