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Thread posted to projects. Please feel free to ask questions

I am more and more convinced the original may well have been sinewed.

Now I knew the timber, the shape and thickness of the tips and the width of the lath at centre and the draw length. Unfortunately no-one knows the important bit- the length overall. My first attempt was, well, let’s call it a learning experience. Too short and too knotty, it nearly worked and...

Making the tiller (stock) should have been easy but the archaeologists drawings were misleading in that they added modern, Asian, round triggers as an illustration of a point in-text but as soon as the text and image became separated the point was lost and the drawing became misleading. The...

There is, in France, a lake called Lac du Paladru which has several flooded sites that have been excavated by various archaeologists. Their finds include several crossbow fragments dated to 1040AD. The earliest known European crossbow remains by several centuries. These are the only drawings

Been building a replica of the earliest known European wood crossbow- the Charavines type using the measurements and drawings of the original tip fragment. Messed up the tillering (teaching the bow to bend) and it’s perhaps only 2/3 as strong as it could be at 50lb but I learned a lot along the...

One for the re-enactors perhaps. Can anyone point me to a blacksmith capable of forging 14th century crossbow bolt heads?

Genius! Thankyou

My son volunteers in a little museum and someone brought this in for identification. Beyond being a storage box, I got nothing. Any ideas?

I saved one end of a broken engineers No 5 vice. All I really wanted was the screw mechanism. Without a lathe or tap and dies, how do I make the threads for the receiver (don’t know the correct name, sorry)? I was thinking of epoxy gluing a series of washers angled across a channel in a...

Any chance you can post a picture of a whistle with a rule or coin or something to give an idea of scale please

Yup

Since the thread is resurrected, am I the only one to use hmg glue sticks and a lighter - very cheap gun packed up mid job and a long reach lighter turned out to be a very useful heat source with no lag time, dripping, hot components.

Worse than the heat is the drip of condensation from your breath in cool weather; the noise of rain/cats/squirrels/birds can be pretty annoying . Pretty much the worst possible form of single skin roof, but, line it with insulation and a face material and it’s ok

I need some decent quality rabbit glue for.gluing horn to horn and wood to sinew. Anyone able to recommend a supplier/brand?

I have always sealed plaster with mist coats of watered down emulsion but can you explain why PVA is the mortal enemy of paint? This is pertinent as tomorrow I am rubbing down and repainting the inside of an exterior wall subject to damp where rain runs down the wall, and had intended to base...

That was an interesting rabbit hole, never come across one before now

So, what is a better lintel?

Please don’t shout at me. Twenty years ago we put every penny we had into reglazing our house in shiny plastic double glazing. When the fitter ripped out the upstairs back window he also accidentally ripped out the rotten lintel. More accurately it fell out as it was only held in by the...

I think a penny dropped, it’s just 2 sets of studding side by side, boarded like normal to make a wall deep enough to house the door. What would the smallest dimensions for the stud timber that you could go to?