Bow for nowt

    Last weekend, I made a bow. Not because I've had a hankering for one, but because I spotted the perfect material and had to give it a go.

    My friend Rebecca was replacing her bed. The old one had a lot of very springy plywood slats, far too good to let go to the tip. So I detached them, bound them up with tape, and brought them back home on the back of my bike.

They're too wide to make a bow on their own, the ends of a bow need to be considerably less stiff than the centre where you hold it. And they weren't long enough to make a bow on their own, I'd have to bolt two of them together.

    So I cut two of them on a taper, leaving a section of a few inches intact where they'd be bolted together. I then drilled three holes for the bolts, and applied a layer of No More Nails glue to the joining surfaces before doing up the bolts. This left me with a long and springy bow, but no means to attach a bowstring to it. Out with the saw again to cut a couple of notches at each end. My bowstring - a knotted piece of the orange baler twine that is ubiquitous on farms - simply hooked over the end of the bow into the notches.

Is it a good bow? Not being an archer I have no idea. But It takes the length of my draw without damage, and it feels as though I'm putting quite an effort into it. And it shoots bamboo canes down the lawn rather well. Next up, a pack of cheap arrows from Amazon, I'm not hard-core enough to do my own fletching.