[solved]Skane/Lillohus crossbow thread

Evening all!  I would like to start a thread dedicated to the Skane crossbow.  I have been sent a fab set of photos from the museum at Kristianstadt  I will need to resize and which I will attempt to store here in the hope someone will try an accurate reconstruction.  It is on my to do list but I am not going to be able to get to it for a little while

Great idea!  I love the simplicity of the Skane lock and built a loose lam Skane-lock bow a couple years back!

I just found your posts about the Colletier a Charavine replicas you made; also your Wordpress  blog.  Beautiful work!

Thankyou, my research on that bow is not finished. I made a wych elm bow to the dimensions of the tip fragment to match the bridle but the elm had a row of pin knots and the bow was too short.  I saw over 80lb before the knots took a lot of set.  Would have been over 100.  Have started the next one using a more aggressive taper and better timber.  I’ll report back on that next Spring

The photos are a complete set of close-ups of the lath from right to left.  You can clearly see the bow is yew, a pretty awful piece of yew, but it is yew nonetheless.

Final image is of the bow-groove, the museum has put one of the mounting nails through the pin hole of the lock mechanism

My next step will be to print off all the images and splice them together then attempt to match them to an enlargement of the drawings.  This should show the level of accuracy in the drawings and how much I can depend on them for measurements for a reconstruction

Great!  Your photos from a museum visit?   Following this whole project with real interest!

Not a museum visit, I emailed them and they took the photos and sent them to me via Sprend.  Big thanks to everyone involved!  Digital images are great especially since flash photography is not allowed.  They also cannot open the cabinet as it is a controlled environment so no measurements can be taken, but, as I know the length of the bow (Alm), I can measure eerything off the images

Very nice.  Digital photograph certainly is wonderful. 

A few years ago I built a museum replica of an American Zither,  and the museum was able to take the instrument out of the display and send me ordinary b&w photos with a tape measure in each image along the sections.  I built my replica, which some players thought was an original (!).  Last year I visited the museum and was able to do a side by side comparison.  I was within a few millimeters in all my dimensions!

I have checked the drawings against the photos and the drawings are pretty accurate.  This is no real surprise but it is good to check.  This gives a centre measure of about 27mm thick by 37mm wide at centre and 13mm x 28mm at the nocks.  I also checked the front profile and found the lath top edge is straight, the front profile taper is all held in the bottom edge.
The thickness taper is really aggressive at 14mm reduction over 14 inches (more or less as the centre 6 inches are more or less the same thickness and the same width, tapers in this central zone are very subtle).

Alm gives the maximum width as 40mm but this is the dimension across the huge knot rather than the true width

In the spirit of the original I grabbed a manky bit of yew from the bottom of my stash, by the time I worked out all the nasty bits, it is 2mm too thin at the centre and 1mm too thin at the tips. It is too wide at the moment and needs straightening but this poor quality bit of Welsh yew with very pale heartwood is seriously strong.  Bracing my knee against the centre and pulling the tips as hard as I can deflects the tips about 1/2 “.  Next step is to steam it, or fix my heat gun , and get it a bit straighter

In the spirit of things, 1-2 mm off in dimension isn't going to change the draw weight much, I'm sure.  I'm not sure whether Yew does better with wet or dry heat...

I think in a longer bow, say a 56” pyramid, 1mm thickness is about 10lb of draw weight at 26”.  As the purpose of the project is to see what the minimum draw weight might have been, I’m ok with getting the dimensions close enough to draw a reasonable conclusion.

Rule of thumb is dry heat for dry wood, wet heat for wet wood, so steaming will mean pre-soaking the timber.  Dry heat is quick and has the added advantage of tempering the wood

o, I sent an email to the museum asking about humidity levels in the crossbow display cabinet as the bow is slightly bent but the drawings show it dead straight - compression wood moves as moisture content changes and a crossbow made of compression wood actually gets stronger as it gets wetter as it recurves more and more - I built a yew compression wood crossbow that moved a couple of inches between winter and summer.  I wondered if the cabinet was drier than the humidity levels when the drawing was made.  The cabinet is somewhere around 40%RH so I am pretty sure the bow is made of compression wood.

Anyway, the museum sent me another information bundle.  Hands up everyone that knew there were TWO Lillo crossbows??  There is a second stock very similar to the first but missing its lath, but there is also a lath missing its stock (the one in the image I posted at the start of the thread).  They sent me a paper by Anders Odman which finds that the layer the crossbows were found in was incorrectly dated and the artefacts are 100 years older than first thought, 14th century and belonging to the first phase of the castle, not 15th century as has been thought.  Not only this but the crossbow bolts from the site are of a Danish type and found pointing toward the castle, indicating a Danish attack (possibly)


Any ideas if Sten Faste is the name of the dratsman or something else - Translate suggests Sten Faste means Stone Fasting............Be kinda nice if it is the name of the artist

TWO Lillohus bows!!!  Amazing!

Nice detective work on that compression wood prod!  Also getting the other info about dates and bolts.  

That's where I sign a drawing, but my name isn't Sten Faste (but I'll be his was...)

Well, done, you!!