New forum member saying hi

[stoneagebowyer]

Hello, everyone. Man, what a playground this is, and the creativity is amazing, let alone the level of craftsmenship I have seen just from a quick glance at various threads.

My name is Dane. I build medieval crossbows, a huge passion of mine, as well as primitive archery and primitive (meaning original, not crude) skills (fire making, edible plants, cave art, etc).

I do plan to build some replica crossbows in time. One is the little steampunk-y crossbow from the animated film 9, made from a wind-up toy key and other bits of old junk. The Sleestak crossbow is another prop I plan to copy, and would like to make both of these functional.

If anyone can point me to threads where folks made these kind of props, I'd be grateful. I am just learning my way around here, so forgive me as I get up to speed. I have tons to learn about figuring out scale based upon screenshots and photos, for one thing, and probably a lot more.

If anyone is interested, I can post examples of my work, though nothing is a replica up to this point.

Thanks,
Dane

 

[Apollo]

Welcome aboard!

Post some pics of your work.

I and others here would love to see them

 

[Alan Castillo]

Oh yes please !!! Welcome, & post away ....... :thumbsup

 

[stoneagebowyer]

Welcome aboard!

Post some pics of your work.

I and others here would love to see them

Thanks for the welcome, Apollo.

Let's see if this works:

http://i630.photobucket.com/albums/uu30/Danemitchell/finished3-1.jpg

This is a Chinese repeating crossbow, and date back to perhaps the 5th century BCE. This one is a precise replica based upon an original artifact from the 19th century, and used poisoned bolts or darts. They are a lot of fun to make and very gratifying to shoot. The magazine holds 10 tiny bolts, and I can get them all into a 3" circle in about 12 seconds.

http://i630.photobucket.com/albums/uu30/Danemitchell/shortfat0042.jpg

This one I just finished a month or so ago. It has a flame birch tiller, the prod is 100 lbs, (so relatively light), inlayed bone along the top of the tiller and the bolt groove, and was a pretty easy build. This isn't based upon any historial examples, but is kind of a generic crossbow, as I was more interested in how a curved tiller would handle. The rolling nut I prefer to make from antler, but I used Delrin, a modern plastic, to test out how it works and machines.

Hopefully, these will show...here goes.

 

[stoneagebowyer]

The posting worked so you can click on the images.

 

[stoneagebowyer]

Cool, worked! Here is the repeater, and one other view of the curved tiller bow.

Sorry about the multiple postings...the functions seem to work easily here. I just have some more learning to do. Dane

 

[stoneagebowyer]

Oh yes please !!! Welcome, & post away ....... :thumbsup

Thanks for the welcome, Alan.

 

[Apollo]

Wow those are beautiful.

really digging the chinese repeater

 

[LeoFirebrand]

Welcome and some really amazing work there. It's always nice to see people with unique interests on this forum. I'm sure alot of people would like to see you put your skills to Chewbacca's Bow Caster. Also I bet you could make a pretty cool Vampire Hunting kit.

As far as finding threads, the search function here works best when you do an advanced search and search topic titles only (at least for me). That's the best advice I can give as I dont know of many threads directly related to your skillset.

 

[stoneagebowyer]

Thanks, Leo. And thanks for the kind words on my work. Same to you, Apollo.

There are a great number of crossbows used in various films. The vampire crossbows from the Underworld films come to mind, as does the bow caster you mentioned, the various Mad Max projectile weapons, and so on. Some you see are stock commercial weapons, such as the crossbow used in the remake of Wax Museum, and the one in the remake of Freight Night. I own the Horton Scout that Darryl Dixon uses to great effect in The Walking Dead, and that is a nifty little crossbow, shooting the bolts at about 225 fps. The red dot sight makes it even sexier. Some are clearly impossible to make as functional weapons, like that very cool repeating weapon in Van Helsing (made palpaple by the presence of Kate Beckinsale ).

I will mess around here and see what I come up with.

Dane