Fenno-Urgian two-wood bow

Rowan is not durable against weather. This may be the reason that no bows made from it have survived.

I have hear that compression Pine and not compresion Fir has been used in these bows.

I do not know how the backing has been determined to be made of birch, but hazel wood looks quite much the same and is good bow wood. It has been growing in Finland since the glasier has retreaded. However it does not grow in the most north part, meaning Lappland.

"Rowan is not durable against weater." :) so with hideglue also.
There is other woods also, like birdcherry, I guess they took what they had.
You can even have the same wood in belly and back. And only take the advantage from the glue line.

I have considered making 2 wood bow from hazel backed bird cherry, but I still haven't. I think these woods should be good mach to each other.

The only bad thing is that since they are both whitish, so it cannot be trivially seen as a laminate bow. Cherry belly would be better in this sense. Or Serviceberry (Amelanchier) backing. (Serviceberry is naturalized and not original spicies however).

If I had to make bows with stone tools, Bird cherry and Rowan would be natural choises as bow wood, since they both can still be worked after they are dry. (Unlike Mapple,Ash) Also both have a tendency to dry well without checking and splitting(unlike Hazel and Syren).

I made one with elm belly and rowan back, it's the fastest bow I have made.

Very nice bow. Do you have a full draw pic? Thanks.

If I put on sinew backing it becomes a novgorod bow :)
With other design on tips it can be found in many tribes at the taiga belt.

From Baltic Sea to Chukotka....Climat and available materials make design very close, if not the same :)
Very nice bow, Redhorse!

Somehow it's not popular to build bows outside the western culture.
But there must be many different bows trough history in the eastern, so much was invented in the east.
This fenno-urgian bow is not the best design but it works good enough for most archers. It can be built of almost any wood but can be difficult to get high speed with the glue on ears. But with experience the dimensions can be done close to "good".
On other hand, if one needs more fps it can be done with higher weight. What would it take to shot 600 grains in 180 fps? 70? 80 lb?
And it's fun to build.

From Tuukka Kumpulainen - " The North Eurasian wood composite, used over a vast area for a very long
time (from western Norway to the Kamtchatka peninsula), was most commonly
made from pine and birch. What often doesn't get mentioned is that the pine
used was anything but your average Scotch pine - it was carefully selected
compression wood that has a much higher density than normal pine and totally
different mechanical characteristics. A birch backing was added to these bows
- typically only a couple of mm thick laminate, but occasionally even thicker
than the belly wood. Most bows of this type have separate, Asiatic-style ears
made from bird cherry or birch. Many are also set back slightly in the handle,
creating a very composite-like appearance. The bows were typically about
man tall, occasionally much longer or somewhat shorter. These bows, of which
only a few compression wood belly slats remain in Scandinavia (apart from
a late, degenerated Saami skipole bow), were in use surprisingly late in
remote Siberian locations. There are many wonderful, early 1900's bows of
this type in museums, and there are reports from the 1960's and even the '90's
of hunters using the traditional bows in Siberia for culling reindeer "

Koryak guides agree to photo with armour and bows their Grandfathers might have used . Photo taken about 1900 during the Jesup Expedition. The interesting armour is made from reindeer antler or sometimes from mammoth ivory!



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"There are many wonderful, early 1900's bows of
this type in museums,"
It's so hard to find for us here in west. Language and distance.
Nice photo, that kind of ear was in the Insulander article.

Redhorse wrote:

It's so hard to find for us here in west.

There in the East too :)
One of my friends visit some museums in Yakutsk and said that there are another museums of small nations in other cities...but the country is too large to visit them all :)

And this friend told me one technology trick about this bows. Some tribes made them from boiled wood - after this process seasoning time is more short and elasticity of wood increased.
Boiling must be done in sea water or in 15-20% solution of household salt.

This saltwater soaking has been on paleoplanet also. But I don't know if anybody has done that yet.
And who knows what wood is best for that.
Pine and birch is first guess but I don't think any birch backing has been found. Other woods combined may work as well.
I have done with rowan-elm, rowan-juniper, elm-elm and now working on one of ash-elm. I have cut some birch that are waiting, don't know yet how birch dries. If cut to firewood it crack is days. But bow wood is longer so I left one with bark and one without.

Thanks for the informative thread Redhorse . I've been fascinated by this type of bow for awhile now ,thanks to you.
I am trying to work out a stave trade for some compression juniper from California . Do you think juniper will work ?

Juniper is perfect belly wood.

The Koryak bows seems to be 64 inch, ears 8 inch, core 48 inch.
With and thickness should give a +70-80 lb bow.
With longer ears they can draw the short core full.
I will try that on next bow.

Redhorse,
the guy that told me about saltwater boiling, do it every time when he makes bow now . He told me that this process can even make kiln-dried wood slightly better :D
I think that most bows that havebirch found on the Russian North are birch + softwood combination (juniper, larch etc.) The most of them are sinewed, so birch is not backing, it's a core :)

How long do you boil them ? Or how do you know when it's done?

Ralph,
I've been told that it must be done about 10 min for every mm of thickness, but it's a field for research...

Yep, I think they took what wood they had. I am right now gluing sinew on my project.

One week drying time and the sinew made 10 lb. But I don't think it is any faster :( just heavier.

Wrong, same arrow vent 20m longer :)

Awesome! You have no idea how much I admire you guys doing this.

Now the bow is almost ready, sinew is on, birch bark backing is on.
And I got my new arrows and did some shooting today. After some time I did a test on long range and the arrow flight 200 meters. So I took my crono and shoot trough it.
Steady over 200 fps. It means 50 joule. 190 at 26", 200 at 27.5", 210 at 28?".
Not bad, made of scrap wood.
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I'm extremely impressed, because of two things, firstly, that you successfully made a good looking and shooting bow from scrap wood, and secondly that this 'scrapwood' bow is faster than my Grozer bow! Well done.
What are the units you are using for the weight of the bow? Newtons?

Regards

60lb is about 270 newton, or 27kg.

E0=0.5*m*(v*v), m=kg and v=m/s

gram * 15.432358=grains

m/s * 3.2808399=fps

200 fps is pretty impressive! - with a good stiff polished flightarrow you should be able to shoot close to 300 meters.

There have been found two bows with a birch back. One from Oslo, Norway, and one from Novgorod, Russia. Both of these have been dated to about 1000 A.D.. The one from Oslo has a pine belly, while the one from Novgorod has been analysed to be juniper. The one from Novgorod has been said to have a sinew backing, but I'm not too sure about what made them conclude that. It was said to have a space between the birchbark and birch laminate, that would have been filled by the sinew backing, but that could just as well be explained by the birch shrinking.


By the way, there has been found a small rowan kids bow in southern Sweden, that has been dated to the mesolithic. - so I think we can be pretty sure that rowan wasn't regularly used as bow-wood in medieval times :)

I wonder how reliable the old analysis of the Novgorod bow is? After all, the famous Vibby bow (belly) was for decades labeled as juniper (Rausing et al), yet recent microscopic wood analysis showed the wood is compression pine. (Even worse mis-ID is the Jokkmokk bow, thought long to be of birch yet compression pine is the truth). Has modern microscopic wood analysis been done on the Novgorod bow? If not, it'd fit nicely into the long line of mislabeled compression pine bellies in the region.

Kviljo, do you have anything more on the Swedish Mesolithic children's bow? Measurements, cross-sections etc.? I'm afraid ethnographic data clearly shows how children's bows are next to useless as proof on anything about adult bows and arrows. For instance, many Amazon and New Guinean children's bows are not only of a completely different style and shape than adult bows but made from an entirely different wood species, too.

I made one with juniper belly and birch back. The birch did give up very fast. I have now removed the birch and put on a rowan back. In a week I should know if the rowan does work better on that bow.
http://images.yuku.com/image/jpeg/c1626 ... 95d149.jpg
http://images.yuku.com/image/jpeg/5df26 ... 40b7aa.jpg

Just an idea. Could it be that the Birch have been hazel?

The woods look very much the same and hazel has been around after the ice age. Does Hazel look like birch microscopically. They are both <betulacae> ?

I would be surprised if they did not test hazel to.
By the way, I have not finish this bow yet. I got a bad glue line and the back come of and that had not been a problem. But on one spot the glue did hold and took a part of belly with it. So I put it aside.

Do you follow the annual ring on the backing strips on your bows?
The one with the sinew looks as if you did (the part of the limb near the handle on the right) but the bow with a birch back which failed I can't see, maybe because of the plain appearance of birch wood.

I'm impressed!

Mostly but not as on a selfbow.

An update, almost a year has pass and I pick up the bow and did a small adjustment. I remove 40 gram wood at the tips and ended at 54 lb at 27" belly. It was 62 lb before.
I shot a series of 392 grains arrows and got 187 fps average. It gives 65% efficiency from a straight fd-curve.
I lost 10 fps with 10 lb lower weight, it's ok I think.

Made an other test today. I have an 522grains arrow and measure at the tillering tree 52 lb at 26" belly. Shot and got 164 fps.
With one inch shorter powerstroke I got 70+% efficiency. If it was correct done it indicate that this kind of bow is more efficient with heavier arrows. And I believe that is already known fact about this kind of bows :)