After quickly grabbing the flame-grilled snake steak and some sweet potato mash for lunch which Ryan barely tasted as he devoured it on the go he headed to the barn to collect his three bows. Just a bit embarrassed and in a rush while awkwardly cradling his bows under one arm Ryan handed off his dirty and empty plate to one of the newer members on dish washing duty before he continued towards the workshop where the smiths had set up. Mike and Stephen were already waiting for him.
“About time you showed up.” Mike let him know that he didn’t appreciate Ryan’s tardiness.
“Sorry, lessons with Leah ran late. Where’s Paulus?” Ryan enquired.
“He’s discussing your armour with Leah and will join later.” Stephen replied.
“So, our garrulous Quartermaster informed us that you reserved quite a chunk of the spines. I assume you planned to use them for the bow you need our help with?” Mike queried directly afterwards.
“Yeah, so, uhm, I have Smithing as a Profession but haven’t actually reached an acceptable level of proficiency as you might imagine. I hope you guys can help me either train the necessary Skills or directly help with the bow. Susan said that she’d handle reimbursing your time.” It wasn’t the easiest thing for Ryan to ask for help so his delivery was a bit rough. “Anyways, I’ve modified my compound bow quite a bit but I’m quickly reaching the point where its base structure might fail due to the force I can now exert, so, I need to forge a new compound bow. Oh, and arrows, I’ve had two arrows shatter on release yesterday. The carbon fibre shafts are not designed to handle the amount of forces my current bow delivers and a stronger one will be worse.”
Mike’s question followed a moment after Ryan was done. “Does it have to be a compound bow?”
Ryan had actually obsessed over this question at length and while he had experience with both compound bows and the more traditional recurve or long bows he had always preferred the mechanical precision of the compound bow. That alone hadn’t been sufficient reason for him to attempt to forge the significantly more complicated compound bow so he started to lay out his reasoning.
“Are you guys familiar with the differences between compound bows and recurve or long bows?” he asked the two smiths.
“Not exactly.” and “Nope” were the two answers he received and had expected.
“Ok, I’ll start with the basics. A long bow, that’s the traditional bow that looks like a half moon, delivers only the strength that the archer can draw and hold the string at to the arrow when released. So basically, if you need to aim and hold you have to fully exert your strength the entire time. It also doesn’t have a fixed draw length so shot strength can vary and relies on the experience of the archer. It’s the simplest to craft and the hardest to learn. It’s generally also lighter than a recurve or a compound bow.”
When Mike and Stephen nodded their understanding he continued. “The recurve bow, that’s the one that looks like a three when not drawn, is an iteration of the long bow. It’s a bit more difficult to craft and has similar characteristics. The main differences to a longbow are its smoother draw and noisier action. Both bows can be drawn until they break under the force exerted.”
Ryan looked at the two smiths and seeing that they were still following his explanation moved on. “Now, the compound bow is a different beast entirely. It is heavier, complicated and needs specialised tools to maintain. Those are the main disadvantages. It has two major advantages. One, it has a fixed draw length due to its construction. This means that you can’t draw it beyond a certain point. As a result it has a maximum power but shots are repeatably accurate. It also means you can’t overdraw the bow beyond its mechanical strength unless your draw length greatly exceeds the length it was designed for”
“The major advantage of the compound is that it has what’s called let-off. Once drawn past a certain point and to its full draw length the force required to hold it lessens significantly. Properly designed and built compound bows only require between ten to thirty-five percent of their draw strength to hold at full draw. It significantly lessens strain on the archer and allows them to shoot far more powerful bows, provided they can pull the maximum draw.” he finished his explanation on the main differences.
Ryan took a deep breath before he came to the reason for choosing the compound bow over its simpler siblings. “That last point is the main reason for making a compound bow. I’ve had a few arrows deflect of armour and with the opponent’s I’ve been facing and those we expect to face in future I need as much power as I can get.”
And then he just had to add some more thoughts he had considered relevant. “I can also more easily modify the compound with stronger limbs if my strength rises and the base, cams, cables and string are sturdy enough. I won’t have to craft an entirely new bow. Also, we have a template in the form of my current bows that are correctly sized for me so we don’t have to start from scratch.”
Before Mike and Stephen could get a word in Ryan continued with his pitch. “I thought we’d use the quills as the base for arrow shafts and am open to advice on what to use for the bow. The riser and cam assembly needs to be as unyielding and impact resistant as possible. The limbs need to have a high tensile and yield strength mainly but we’ll need to experiment there to see how much power I can actually exert.”
“Ok good, makes sense.” Stephen said once Ryan remained quiet for a few seconds.
Mike’s voice carried his grin beautifully as he teased Ryan, “I just wanted to make sure that you didn’t choose the compound because it looks cooler.”
“That might have been a contributing factor.” Ryan quipped right back with a smile on his face. “So what do you suggest?”
“So,” Mike started immediately, “we might have discussed some ideas already. I assumed you’d want a compound bow but we weren’t certain on the required specifics. So, what I think and Stephen concurs with is that the majority of the large quills be used exclusively for arrow shafts. We’ve played around with them and if we melt or forge them we destroy what makes them special. Their tips are nearly completely comprised of tungsten carbide and the shaft is a twisted matrix of steel, tungsten, titanium aluminide and some other stuff. Fairly stiff, not too heavy and with a very hard tip. Also ridiculously sharp. If we heat and forge it we mostly destroy the matrix and they lose quite a bit of stiffness and yield strength. It’s not a question of the material but how it is put together as a composite. They’re also hollow and thus lighter than expected.”
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Mike looked at him to see if he had a question and when Ryan just nodded he continued. “So, they’re not all entirely straight nor uniform in size. We can easily straighten them but diameter would have been a problem if we hadn’t found this beautiful lathe right here in this very workshop. I can get it running on our solar system so that’s great. What’s not so great is that that will put a heavy load on our batteries but Liz said that getting you, Miguel and Carsten the proper equipment was important so it’s a go.”
Ryan had no idea who Carsten was but assumed it was another member that moved over from Resolute so decided not to raise a question. Mike, unaware that Ryan had no idea who he was speaking of continued seamlessly. “We’ll do the shafts on our own, Susan has already negotiated payment for the time with us and you guys are paying the Guild for the resources.”
“We can also partially cut of the tips and thread them and melt down any tungsten carbide we have on hand here for heads. Thankfully this workshop also has an outstanding selection of tool bits we won’t have any use for in the mid-term future so we can also use those.” William continued with enthusiasm.
Stephen interrupted belatedly. ”Those two also need new bows and we’ll use your project as a test run because neither of them have any idea about smithing.”
Mike wasn’t bothered by the interruption and went straight back to talking, explaining his thoughts on materials. “So, for the stock of the bow it’s probably best if we make it out of solid steel, the weight shouldn’t prove an issue for you and making it solid should make it damn near indestructible. The bendy parts can probably be made out of the springs from one of the cars here. For the rest we need a better understanding of how a compound bow is assembled.”
Ryan knew that this had been inevitable and for that reason had brought along all his bows. The oldest he had taken was a single cam model while the two newer ones were a double cam and a binary cam bow. He also pulled the abomination he had made of his brothers bow from his back and set it down on the table with his bows. Ryan hesitated before he selected the double cam and moved it to his bow press which he had carried into the workshop before going to bed the night before.
“I wondered what that was.” Stephen commented.
“It’s my bow-press. You can’t unstring a compound without it because you need to keep the limbs, the bendy parts for the uninitiated, under pressure. And the ‘stock’ is called the riser.” Ryan answered with a dig at Mike. “Actually,” he wondered out loud, “maybe I’m strong enough to manually do it these days. If someone strings and I hold the bow?”
Ryan knew it was a moot point because he’d definitely need a bow press for the new, stronger bow so he fixed the bow into the press and started unstringing it, explaining each step. Once that was done he took the bow to the table and disassembled it. In detail he went over the functions of the outer and inner cams, the buss cable and the string. Explaining how they formed a pulley system that allowed the archer to exert more force on the limbs. He also explained that the elliptical profile of the outer cams resulted in the let-off. Because this took quite a while he went through the functions of the cable rod, the bow stabiliser, the string silencer, string stop, sights and draw length adjustment screw with a lot less detail. The latter, save for the sights, were not essential for the bow to function in any case.
Mike and Stephen remained quiet and attentive throughout and when Ryan concluded his explanation by asking; “Any questions?” Mike only commented “That’s a lot to take in but I think we have the gist of it.”
“So, my thought on the matter is to basically bulk up all the components and use stronger materials where possible.” Ryan put forward. “I can easily handle a bow that weighs three to four times as much as this one and as long as the important dimensions remain the same it shouldn’t affect draw length at all. The cams and the string can’t be too heavy because that negatively affects arrow speed.” he paused before asking, “Any suggestions on how we can do it?”
“So, following that thesis on the compound bow I’d stick with my suggestion on the riser if it needs to be as stiff and rigid as possible.” William emphasised. “I might have an idea on the cam bearings but we’ll need to take apart that quadbike and bike to see if we can use the cam-shaft or crankshaft bearings. I think the shafts of the cars will be too great in diameter and from your explanation the ratios of the outer to inner cams is important.”
“They are,” Ryan answered, “but as longs as the outer cams retain their dimensions the draw length is unaffected. If we use a stiffer material for the limbs we could possibly decrease the diameter of the inner cams without losing power. But that doesn’t solve the issue of bearing size. We can’t use the current bearings because they haven’t been designed to handle the forces involved.”
“What qualities do you need for the material for the cams? Stiff, high compressive strength and hard wearing?” Stephen interjected.
“Yeah.” Mike and Ryan answered in unison.
“So why don’t we use titanium?” Stephen suggested.
“And where would we get titanium?” Mike asked.
“Simple. Our forge should be able to melt titanium if we force feed it some Energy through my runescript. So we melt down Ryan’s disassembled bow here and cast the inner and outer cams as one piece.”
“That might work.” Mike agreed while Ryan was shaking his head in vehement denial at the thought of melting down one of his precious bows. The fact that the riser of the bow was made of titanium had been a marketing gimmick more than a useful feature back when the bow had been made but now Ryan considered whether melting down the riser, once they had made a copy of it, was a good idea. Unfortunately it made sense so Ryan added.
“Ok, we can do that but only after we made a replacement riser. I want to keep these three bows as templates because they all have different cam arrangements.”
Mike’s and Stephen’s looked confused so Ryan accepted the necessity of another explanation on the difference between the single, dual and binary cam set-up on the three bows. Ryan’s explanation was comprehensive but the two didn’t quite follow the intricacies of the differences and looked lost when he was done. Instead of clarifying the issue Ryan decided to short-cut the process. “I want to use the disassembled bow as the template for the new one, it’s the mechanics which I’m most familiar with and unlike the single cam which is the easiest to maintain, has parallel limbs. The binary cam has arched or willow tree limbs and I’m not certain we can replicate those.”
“What…” when Mike made motions to start questioning the implications of different limb configurations Ryan cut him short before he could get started.
“Doesn’t matter for now. We’ll use the double cam as template. I’ll also need to find suitable string material. Light, insanely high tensile strength and not prone to wear out or fray. I’m out of dacron string and probably need a material that’s stronger anyway. Steel cable is out because if the string is too heavy it affects arrow speed negatively. Massively so.”
Stephen had an answer ready for the issue though. “That shouldn’t be a problem. I’ve actually set up an array for handling a similar issue. String won’t be a problem.”
Ryan accepted the answer for now. “You’ll definitely have to explain that later but I’ll trust your judgment on that. If I’m correct that sorts out the material issues?”
“It does. I suggest you get started on disassembling the bike and quad and I will start to make a duplicate riser. Stephen can start testing materials for the limbs. The riser because we need to melt the current one down for the cams and the limbs and bearings because they are critical.” Mike put forward his proposed plan of action.
Ryan didn’t see an issue with the plan and just headed over to grab the set of tools he thought he’d need from the truly comprehensive set neatly arranged on the pin-board covering the inside wall of the workshop. As he walked away a vaguely familiar sensation uplifted his mood. He puzzled at this feeling and only realised that it was familiar because he often felt the sensation when he was subjected to Fury’s endless enthusiasm. Satisfied with this discovery he started the disassembly of the motorbike engine with childlike glee by taking the key out of the ignition.