I haven't been posting much here as I haven't been buying, trading, or shooting firearms much lately. Instead, I've been spending a lot of time playing with archery, something I first got involved in back in the early 1970s. Back then I shot a 3-piece take-down bow equipped with a sight and a magnetic flipper rest,me hooting Easton GameGetter shafts with plastic fletching. Today it's all longbows, shooting feather fletched cedar arrows, Seen above is my latest acquisition, a Rudderbow Tri-Lam English Longbow. In the quiver are an assortment of arrows I was testing that day, including several (the ones with the red barred feathers) made from ordinary hardware store dowels.
As long as I'm talking longbows, let me share a pet peeve: To me, a longbow has straight limbs, period. Maybe the limbs have a bit of backset, as many primative bows did. What's termed a "Reflex/Deflex Longbow" is really closer to a recurve than a traditional longbow. Such bows have strongly curved flat limbs, which the traditional longbow has narrow, deep, limbs.
Howard Hill, the greatest of American archers and bowhunters, used a longbow long after recurves had outstripped longbows in popularity. His reasoning was that the longbow design was more forgiving of a less than perfect release, and more consistent and accurate in real field conditions. He wrote that he wasn't a good enough archer to shoot a recurve well. Now Hill could probably outshoot most everyone on the planet with any bow, but he had a very good point. The true longbow is far more tolerant of all sorts of shooting errors, as the limbs are much stiffer in resistance to twisting than are the wide, flat, limbs of a recurve or modern R/D longbow. I prefer the traditional style longbow in part for that reason, and in part because it is traditional.
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