Forum: Story Discussion and Feedback

your link didn't work for me...this one does

https://www.wood-database.com/osage-orange/

looks like your missing the : after https

Didn't one of the US Native American tribes make bows out of Osage that were about 3 feet long for use on horseback that were good at close range but had a short range?

I would imagine that several of the plains tribes made bows sized to be usable from horseback. Whether any of them used Osage as a material I have no idea.

The horse bows of the Plains tribes were often composite designs make from a wood core (like osage orange) with horn and sinew laminated to it with strong hide glue. They were a recurve design and very effective.

Mongols use the same type for the same reasons -- a shorter bow is required when shooting from a horse, but short all-wood bows wouldn't survive the first pull of the string due to the forces involved.

I've made a few wood bows, called self-bows because they're all wood and not layers of wood, sinew and horn. Osage is one of the nastiest woods to work with, imo, because the grain doesn't run straight and smooth like Hickory or Yew. Of course, it's worth working into a bow because for all it's grain is aggravating, the bows are tremendously durable and look fantastic!

I was wondering what a self bow was since I ran across a mention of one in another story, and hadn't taken the time yet to look it up.

Whether any of them used Osage as a material I have no idea.

Traditional Cherokee bows were either Hickory or Osage wood. The latter was preferred.

US Native American tribes make bows out of Osage

Pretty much all the different Indian tribes East of the Rockies you know that hilly area over by California to the Atlantic ocean made and used Osage orange bows.

The Osage orange make an excellent bow in what we would refer to as a medium weight bow as they can be made for a draw weight between 30 - 80 pounds and most found being around the 60 pounds of draw weight. One of the characteristic of the Osage Orange tree is that the wood is naturally Rot Resistance thus adding to the durability and life span of the bow in an environment that the Indian tribes lived in.

A bow of Osage Orange that is 40 inches in length and a draw of 20 inches at 54 pounds will fire a 30 inch by 14.5 ounce arrow at around 150-160 feet per second. Considering that the plains Indians where able to bring buffalo down I would consider that highly effective.

As to why Indians hunted so closely to the buffalo on horse back that was because once they shot the first buffalo the whole heard would start to stampede and would run at 35 mph (56 km/h) for distance 5 Miles (8 km) so there target of opportunity vanished quickly and the other and biggest reason they wanted to get close was that the Indians wanted to shoot down onto the target so that when the buffalo collapsed they would not land on the arrow and break it as arrows where prized and hard to replace and more so out on the plains.

He makes them about a 60 lb draw

What does a 6-pound draw mean? Or any other draw. Is it that a person has to weigh at least 60 pounds in order to use the bow? And whatever the number is - how do you determine what the "draw" is. Is there a "draw meter" or something? Does a higher number in draw mean the bow is weaker? stronger? longer? prettier?

What does a 6-pound draw mean? Or any other draw.

It refers to the amount of force required to draw (pull back) the bowstring.

For a 60-pound bow, the force required to draw the bow is the same as the amount of force required to lift a 60 pound weight.

For any N-pound bow, the force required to draw the bow is the same amount of force required to lift a N pound weight.

how do you determine what the "draw" is. Is there a "draw meter" or something?

Yes, it's called a scale. There are spring scales from which an object can be hung to get it's weight. Such scales can also be put into a rope or cable to measure force pulling laterally on the line.

They also get referred to as force meters.

There are specialized scales of this type specifically made for measuring the draw weight of a bow.

But if you know how to rig it, any generic spring scale can be used.

Does a higher number in draw mean the bow is weaker? stronger? longer? prettier?

A higher number means the bow is stronger. This has two implications.

1. The bow is harder to draw, the archer needs to be stronger.
2. More force is imparted to the arrow. It will go farther and hit harder.

For a compound bow, the draw weight would be the maximum force before the pulleys turn over and the force required drops dramatically so that the holding weight is a small fraction of the maximum pull required.

For "traditional bows" (no pulleys -- long bows or recurves), the draw weight would increase the further the arrow is pulled back, so the draw weight is generally listed as "xx# at xx". Often, the draw is at 28" but not always as, depending on length and other factors, bows can begin to "stack" (get much harder to draw much more quickly) at either shorter or longer draw lengths.

Howard Hill is said to have once been in a shop where the owner had a bow he couldn't string. Boasting and joking was going on. Someone bet Hill he couldn't draw the bow. "If you can string it, I can draw it." It took two men to string the bow, but Hill then drew the arrow all the way past the bow and let it down on the other side. Estimates put the draw weight of the bow, iirc, at around 180#. (And, it is WAY harder to let a bow down smoothly than it is to draw it!)

For "traditional bows" (no pulleys -- long bows or recurves), the draw weight would increase the further the arrow is pulled back, so the draw weight is generally listed as "xx# at xx".

I wasn't unaware of that but thought it was getting too complex for someone who had no idea what the draw weight was.

Makes sense!

Also note that it's been said that a longbow at full draw is 90% of the way to "broken". There's a reason they're so long... simple wooden sticks are not actually all that flexible, so they have to be long to be able to bend that far. If you overdraw them, they very quickly start to stack, and not long after, snap. If you underdraw them, on the other hand, they lose a lot of efficiency... and they're not terribly efficient bow designs to begin with. So there's a very narrow range in which they actually work properly, and neither underperform nor break.

The length requirements depend on draw length and wood type. I've got a chunk of black locust, which is a decent bow wood, though not as good as yew or Osage orange, seasoning in my garage, and figured that, at my 34" draw, the bowstave is going to have to be nearly 7½' long.

34"! Yowsa! Long draw length for a traditional bow!

34"! Yowsa! Long draw length for a traditional bow!

Draw length is determined by the archer.

Proper full draw goes with the bow held in one outstretched arm, drawing the bowstring back with the other hand to the corner of your mouth.

The length is then measured from the bowstring at rest to the corner of your mouth, but it pretty much comes to around the length of your arm.

It's possible to shoot a bow that won't support a full draw for a given archer but it's very difficult to shoot accurately like that.

A modern compound bow and some modern recurves have a bit of adjustability but a traditional longbow has to be made to fit the archer.

Umm, was just saying that 34" is unusually long for traditional archery. And, Olympic archers typically anchor under the jaw with the string touching the their chin and the center of their nose. And I think the measure is from the belly of the bow to the anchor point, not from the position of the string at rest. (String at rest to belly of bow is "brace height," something that traditional archers play with to "tune" a bow.)

Many of traditional archers don't use the fully erect, locked stance of Olympic target archery or of compound shooters, thus resulting in shorter draw lengths. Not as repeatable for target shooting, but perhaps better for hunting situations. Howard Hill never did all that well in NAA competitions, but was hella good in NFAA, and, of course, a phenomenal hunting archer.

Sorry, it's 34" arrow shafts. The actual draw is only 32". But, yeah, it's a long draw. I'm fairly tall, and have very wide shoulders even proportionate to my height. My wingspan is like three inches more than my height, and the difference is all across my shoulders.

sue a 'yard stick' for marching pace measuring.

Dismissed for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted. :)

Most systems a pace is the rough equal of a yard, which is why the military used to sue a 'yard stick' for marching pace measuring. os 400 paces would be about 400 yards, not 800 yards.

No. That's a step. A pace is two steps, left foot to left foot, not left foot to right foot. That's nominally two yards, though in practice, especially for shorter medieval people, will be a bit less than that.

The word "mile" derives from Latin mille passuum, literally "a thousand paces". Mile markers were set on the old Roman roads by legionnaires literally pacing off the distances as the marched. A mile is 1760 yards, not 1000.

We're talking about medievalesque measurements. This is the relevant definition:

c. Five Roman feet or 58.1 English inches, measured from the point at which the heel of one foot is raised to the point at which it is set down again after an intervening step by the other foot.

But in any case, there's a reason I spent half my post on the assumption that they were using a "pace" of half that length.

Until this discussion came up every usage of the word pace as a measurement I'd seen in life and in writing equated it to a yard.

Prior to this discussion had you never heard of a pace maker?

:)

@Ernest Bywater

Until this discussion came up every usage of the word pace as a measurement I'd seen in life and in writing equated it to a yard.

Prior to this discussion had you never heard of a pace maker?

A pace maker is not a measurement.

A pace is two steps,

Not exactly. A Roman pace was two Roman steps where a Roman step was 2½ Roman feet. The US pace is 2½ ft. A stride is 2 paces.
The confusion might be caused by the sometimes used double step as a pace which makes the pace twice as long. The standardized pace in the US though is 2½ ft.
So 400 paces would be 1000 ft = 333.33 yards.

You know, FantasyLover uploaded a glossary for Young Warrior that states what the length of a pace is in the story. Other definitions aren't really relevant to the story.

Looks like he did the same research I did and also came to 2.5 feet for a pace and 400 paces = 1000 feet = 333 yards.