Baked arrow shafts

Daniel,
Where did you hear about baked arrow shafts? I have seen references to timarli bows being put in an oven to condition them. However, most of the Turkish references I have to arrow making mention keeping the wood a long time in stable conditions to allow even drying of the the wood.

As a gourmet Private Chef, I prepare Ottoman Arrows in a traditional tandır oven preheated to 400F (200C) and use a dry rub mixture of butter, salt, cumin, nigella seeds, saffron and fennel seeds. :roll: :lol: :shock:

I can understand why they would bake the shafts. Different woods, different ages will have differing moisture content. Baking will give everything a common moisture content which will stabilize and remain constant as they cool.

Kiln drying wood is a modern development that many traditional bowyers decry because the moisture content is often reduced too much and the wood becomes brittle.

However, Kani did write about conditioning bows in a conditioning box inside an oven. I had assumed that this was to reduce the moisture content of the sinew back of the bow. Adam discussed it in his book and it is described in Hein and Klopsteg.

I recall baking of arrows in the Kani's book (it was in the Klopsteg/Hein translation). This will indeed reduce mass a little and should increase stiffness of wood. I have tried the method (something similar to the above). The shafts felt stiffer and lost a few percent of mass, but I did not try to test for spine. When the heating is overdone, the shafts become too brittle.

Heat-overdried wood should maintain slightly lower moisture content than air dried wood over the whole range of ambient humidities, so the method should be useful. It is hard to say if the stiffness remains a little higher indefinitely or reverts back to the pre-treatment levels.

Adam

In The Traditional Bowyer's Bible, there is an account of heating and grooving arrows to increase stiffness. Actually the author was making grooved arrows in the Native American way and discovered the subsequent heating made stiffer arrows.

Heating arrow shafts and spear shafts increase hardness is well documented in many areas and periods. The mention in Klopsteg is similar to how the Koreans treat bamboo. Except where the Koreans heated each shaft separately until it started to sweat, the Turks placed a stack in a baking oven and waited until they changed colour and oozed resin. This process was started after several months of air drying.

This process would both heat-harden the arrow and reduce the weight of the shaft by removing resin. It is not intended for final seasoning because the shafts were air dried for another three to five years.

I had forgotten these details, but it is interesting to see how they have a parallel in the Korean practice. The manufacture of aspen arrows in Chengdu followed a similar process of heating until the colour changed. Klopsteg doesn't mention straightening the arrows after or during the heating, but this was done in China and Korea.

Many thanks for your reply.
Refering to TBB: are You sure the Author wrote "grooving to increase stiffness"? I recall reading about grooving with purpose of keping dogwood arrows straight. But its been a while since I read the book last time and I might be wrong.

Daniel, you are right. Generally, the purpose of grooving shafts in conjunction with lateral heating the shaft is to make the arrow stay straight for a longer period of time. It was used on shoot shafts by natives in the North America. As Jim Hamm rediscovered, grooving makes sense when done before heat-straightening process. His explanation is that the thin ridges present on the edges of the grooves become hot quicker than the surface of the shaft when heated, in effect the groove ridges get stiffer and help to keep the shaft?s shape after heat-straightening.
Curious of the idea I tried the method on some crooked and quite dried, not previously straightened hazel shoots. After grooving the shafts before heating and straightening I treated the shafts with animal fat (deer fat works very well, as it doesn?t make the shafts greasy afterwards as boar fat does for example) to prevent the shafts from getting scorched and to help the heat penetrate into the shaft.
I?m very satisfied with the outcome, the grooving/heating method definitely works very well for keeping shafts from warping with time.

I apologize for being off-topic.

Some more datas from baking shafts (boo)


http://www.powerfibers.com/html/bamboo_ ... atory.html

Yes, usually baking of arrow- shafts means all the points you are stating above.
I?m not sure, but I remember a way of heating the middle- section of the shaft, for to get similiar results like in barreled shafts?

Ashbow, your grooving tool looks almost exactly like mine.

Michael

Michael, the groover isn't mine, it was made by a Swedish bowyer I know. The grooving tip is bone.

That link provides very useful data Fusizoli. Thank you.
Author's experience matches my own in terms of permanent weight loss: within a first week after baking the wood has regained 10 grains on average (out of 20 grains lost after baking) and looks like its gonna stay like that. That would put it in 4-5% range.
I'm still very curiuos about changes in spine though.

For me this baking shaft thing is use just for flight arrows, for hunting or target use I newer use this just heat straighten and treat the critical parts. I think baking makes the shaft too rigid for an every day use, but it is just a thinking because newer try it on target arrows.
I know Turkish flight arrows was heat treatenned but I dont hear anything simillar about target arrows yet. (have to read more :) )

The link got from Alan on PaleoPlanet more info here
http://paleoplanet69529.yuku.com/topic/29783

Ashbow wrote:

Generally, the purpose of grooving shafts in conjunction with lateral heating the shaft is to make the arrow stay straight for a longer period of time.

[?]

I?m very satisfied with the outcome, the grooving/heating method definitely works very well for keeping shafts from warping with time.

It would be interesting to learn what is considered to be ?a longer period of time? and how the term ?with time? is defined.

I?ve got four hand planed, hand sanded and heat treated viburnum shafts ? non grooved. They are about three years old. Every shaft has been shot over 500 times. All four shafts stayed perfectly straight over this three years period.

The shafts:

[external image]

Of plains Indian arrows which have grooving, it is often done in a wavy line. Sometimes one or two grooves is straight and a third is wavy. Plains arrows are famous for not staying straight. A restraightening was done on the night before a hunt or warpath in the manner that Asians tuned horn bows.

This has everything to do with the species of material. For instance look at California arrow collections. These are often incredibly straight even after 100 years whereas plains arrow rarely to never are.

To my thinking grooving is a decoration intended to impart lightning-like qualities to an arrow. For the same reason bird of prey feathers are almost exclusively used to impart hunter qualities to the arrow.

Lightning and bird of prey=death from the sky.

Do not become confused by reservation period arrows, made with different intentions. -j-

Hartung, I?m afraid there will be no definite answers, it certainly depends on the species of wood used, the environment in which the arrow are stored and used, moisture changes etc.
In my case I used quite crooked hazel shoots, the arrows were made in August.
From my experience a non-grooved and heated hazel shoot shaft would warp more or less in a period of a couple of months, especially in the spot where any sharp bend was present before the straightening and when experiencing more of an ?outdoor life?. With the grooving/heating treatment of hazel I experience no warping hence my satisfaction with the outcome. Anyway the grooving before heat straightening reduces the straightening time, at least with hazel.

I also believe Jim Hamm had not been a liar when putting down his experience about the grooving affair.
I still need to find out how the method work for others.

I don?t have any experience with viburnum genus as a shaft material, but good to hear your shafts are straight after three years.

Jack, I used three ?straight? grooves, Jim Hamm reports that while he prefers them straight, he sees no particular difference when the grooves are straight, spiral or wavy.
When you refer to plains arrows being famous for not staying straight, do you refer to some historical reports or to actual artifacts?

But all of this is terribly off-topic, perhaps we shouldn?t discuss the matter here.

Ashbow; I think we are quite on topic.

I would not be harsh on Hamm. At the time he wrote his first book I am not sure he had even been in a museum. He is a hugely successful author but relays many stories and theories as facts. Ever notice that his book on museum artifacts was after many others?

It would be difficult to go into any Southwestern history museum without seeing bows and arrows. If communicating with curators it is common to be invited into storage to handle artifacts. And there are many private collectors.

Authors include Laubin, Hamilton, Allely and Baldwin. Baldwin has photos of hundreds of plains arrows, just don't read his text, he is not an archer at all.

Native American archery writings are just as full of mythology as any other archery traditions. We want to know the verifiable facts. These are just my opinions. -j-

I have one Turkish target arrow. Judging by the colour of the wood it has been heat treated. Around where the tang of the point was inserted there is charring suggesting it had been placed in hot ashes after gluing as described in Klopsteg. This arrow is very stiff, barrelled and has an applied horn nock. The nock shape is not the standard tulip shape, but it has slightly longer cusps.

Interesting stuff!

Another example of heat-treated arrows:
Qing military regulations mention a certain "fire treated arrow". The text doesn't get into detail on how it was made but the character used is kao, meaning "roasted" as in kaoya (the famous roasted Beijing Duck). The texts further states that they were meant to be able to endure moist.

The spear-shaped tip on these arrows is elsewhere described as being especially suitable for piercing rattan. Rattan armor, in the form of helmets cuirasses and shields, was widely used in the humid southern regions of China. Qing troops went there from the dry North in order to quell a few rebellions.

The untreated, Northern-made arrows were perhaps prone to getting weaker spines or deformation a lot when in these moist regions and this was their solution to it.

-Peter

Jack,
I agree with you that Laubin, Hamilton and Allely are perhaps more competent authors as regarding the actual native American archery artifacts. Hamm when writing his first book put more emphasis on the practical aspect and rather provided examples how to craft working bows, not necessary exact replicas, e.g. his composites incorporating wooden cores. I regard him as a competent person in the field of the practical experiments and trust him on the bowyer/fletcher?s aspect.
Arrow grooving has been pondered in the literature since the XIX cent. but it seems that Hamm was the first person to make any advanced experimenting in that field.