Basics of design

    "Hi Nate.  As my years of bow making progressed, I did make some subtle changes.  I also observed things that Mr. Hill omitted, which I blended into my bows, yet staying with his basic design.  His own bows will show similar, what I call refinement, from the 1930s-40s.  I believe those were his best bows, during those later years.

   Regarding a certain longbow, he wrote me saying if I could build it, he would "take a back seat to you as a bowyer".  He later commented it was the most near perfect bow he'd ever seen anyone make."

   The above quotes were from texts that John Schulz sent to me when I mentioned certain particulars that I'd noticed in his bows over the years.  I have a few of John's bows, from different eras and although he made changes to accommodate the wishes of his employers at times, and he incorporated certain design features to work around the qualities of the materials he had available,  he always held to Hill's basic design.  This photo shows two of John's bows while building bows for Ted Ekin of Howard Hill Archery.  Both bows are made with no tip inserts...the earlier bow which has black glass has very small tips and a very skinny handle.  It came to my possession through a friend, from the widow of Ed Hill, a friend of Howard's that accompanied him to Africa and is the fella fighting the python in "Tembo".  Ed happened to retire to and pass away while living in my home town.  Anyway,  I showed this bow to Schulz and asked about the tiny tips and skinny handle sweeps.  He said that bow was built for Ted under Ted's direction that the bows made by John had to look like the bows built by Don Burdette who had ceased building bows for HHA.  Ted didn't want the public to know there'd been a bowyer change.  Don built bows in this manner, so John copied them.  The second bow has a brown back and white belly and even though it's a couple hundred bows later down the line, it has some of same characteristics in the handle although the tips were starting to get a little wider.  I discussed with Schulz that he made wider tips over the years, departing from the real narrow ones of his early bows.  He said with a smile, "the wider tips are a little more stable, less prone to twisting...and even an old dog can learn new things if he does them long enough"   This statement falls in line with the limb twisting  encountered as bamboo quality gradually got worse.

   One thing to remember, that these bows built by the Hill bowyers over the years, including Schulz, were being made for the public in great quantities.  The techniques used by the bowyers had to be streamlined and of quality that would hold up in the field.  No one wanted warranty issues caused by limbs or handles twisting, or bamboo belly chrysalling or things like that.  The bowmaking techniques Hill preferred to get his concave convex limb design were hard to use when making lots of bows, due to the length of time the process took.  Using fiberglass on flat limbs greatly improved the success rate but until Schulz had an epiphany of sorts,  all the bows were still being made in the two stage process.

   The two stage process was done by building the stave including the handle, shaping and tillering the stave and then adding the backing or fiberglass.  Hill determined that this was the best way to build his style of longbow.  When Schulz had obtained a few years of bowmaking under his belt, he had a meeting with Tom Jennings and Tom discussed the bowmaking method of building the bow in all one step...meaning the entire bow was glued up at one time then shaped and final tillered.  John went to Hill with this idea...it wasn't new, just new to John because Hill had taught him the Hill way and that's the way that John built all his bows.  Hill said it would not work to tiller the bow after the glass was applied, all in one build. 

   John thought the process through and kept track of the dimensions of his limbs after he'd tillered them and before he added the glass.  After some time he had a good idea of what the proper limb taper was to get the proper Hill limb tiller profile.  John made some jigs and pre-tapered his limb lams to the proper dimensions.  This Hill style limb taper is NOT a straight taper from handle to tip, fyi.  It is a varying, graduated taper.  John built a bow using his pre-tapered lams, finished it with glass and took it over for Hill to inspect.  Hill did so and commented on what a good bow it was.  Then John spilled the beans and said the bow was not made in the Hill fashion of shaping and tillering the limbs as a stave before adding glass...but rather the process had all been done in one step because the lams were pre-tillered before glue up.  Hill could hardly believe it and John said he asked to inspect the bow once more.  After doing so,  Hill proclaimed that "I guess the old man was wrong".  John said at that point,  Hill gave him the approval to build all the Hill style bows in that manner and from then on, that's the way that Schulz built the Hill style longbow, for Shawnee Archery, Howard Hill Archery, and American Longbow.  Here again is the refinement of the Hill style longbow coming into play over the years.

   What was very important to Hill and Schulz was the limb tiller.  Schulz called it the Gothic Arch.  If you look at his bow limbs throughout the years and thousands of bows, you'll see what I mean.  The limb did not have excessive limb bend at any point from handle to tip.  There is no variance to the parabolic shape (Gothic Arch) of the limb.  You can see this limb shape in the next photo.  The Gothic Arch in action...The same two Schulz-made bows as pictured above, with two of my bows laying on top.  They mirror.  I do not know the exact formula that Schulz used to pre-taper his limbs...he never divulged that to me.  However,  I build bows in a similar manner to the original Hill method because I don't build them for a living and need the quantity.  I tiller the limbs and add the glass.  I come up with the same tiller as Schulz through a different process.  This was approved by Schulz when he inspected my bows, and the important thing to him was that the tiller aka braced limb profile shape was the correct Gothic Arch.  John liked to say that he could pretty much tell how a bow shot by looking at it's braced profile.

   

   I encourage all to brace your bows and see how close they come to the Hill-preferred and Schulz-promoted Gothic Arch, the limbs bending all the way down "into" the handle, with no straight section of non-working limb extending from the handle.  As Hill said, each inch of limb has to do it's share of the work.     Subjects for another time.   Until then,

   Shoot straight.