My paddles are really primitive. I mostly use a Swedish hand ax, draw knife, spoke shave, rasp and cabinet scraper. I do cheat and finish up with an orbital sander. I mostly eyeball the curved faces …Bnystrom would probably faint if he saw my crude handicraft.
Yeah I’ve been interested in archery since I was about seven or eight years old and started making bows then, but took a long break, and got back into it about ten years ago. My videos are pretty amateurish stuff. I mostly made them from experiments I was doing when I was learning to make new styles of bows. I posted them so folks can say …hey he made a bow - I could do it too. I’ve helped some young folks offline get going making bows, and that felt pretty rewarding for making the videos. It’s very satisfying to make a bow, the string and your own arrows, and they are good enough to shoot a heavy arrow 220 yards or hit a target at 140 yards. I think it taps into my ancestors in a way. If someone wants to just make a decent 45 lb bow, you can buy a piece of red oak at Lowes or Home Depot and it will shoot well enough to use for hunting or simple target shooting.
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Naw, if you look in the “Making a greenland paddle with hand tools” thread, you’ll see that I recently gotten into carving bowls and spoons using a Swedish axe, draw knives, spokeshaves, rasps and gouges. I can fully appreciate the skill required to use these tools to produce functional items and the learning curves involved. My results so far are rather amateurish, but I expect that and they should improve with more practice. The main thing is that I’m having fun doing it.
FWIW, I used to be heavily into archery, but a different form. I was staff shooter for PSE for nine years, owned an archery shop and competed in hundreds of 3D and target tournaments. I’ve thought about making a bow or two, but my shoulders are in somewhat sad shape, so getting back into archery is probably not in the cards for me.
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