ANST - Fletching - speeding up

[Keith Hood]

One of the guys on the Ansteorra mailing list said something a while 
back that shames me to admit I didn't think of it first.  I think it was 
Ozy - whoever it was, I owe him a bottle of wine or something.

A jig to speed up fletching GT ballista bolts.  There's a way to make 
such a jig real simple.  See crude drawing below.


|----------------------------------------------------|
|                                                    |
|    (Wood)           |--------|                     |
|                     |        |                     |
|-------------|-------|        |-------|-------------|
|  (Spacer)   |         (Hole)         |  (Spacer)   |
|-------------|-------|        |-------|-------------|
|                     |        |                     |
|   (Wood)            |--------|                     |
|                                                    |
|----------------------------------------------------|


Take two pieces of 2x4, each about 4 or 5 inches long, and tape them 
together.  Drill a 1" hole in the center of the crack between the 
boards.  Separate the wood blocks and stick on one of them a piece of 
cardboard or leather or something, the same thickness as the material 
for the fletches, as a spacer.  To use the jig, put the fletches on the 
bottom piece of wood next to the spacers, lay the golf tube in the hole, 
and tape the 2x4's together.  You can use this to hold the fletches on 
if you glue them.  If you only use tape, you can put the fletches in so 
their upper ends stick out of the jig.  That will hold them still 
against the tube while you apply tape between them and the tube.  For 
using with glue, it would be a real good idea to round off the edges of 
the hole for clearance, or coat them with plastic or wax, so the glue 
doesn't stick the jig to everything else.

For doing 3 fletches, glue another thin block of wood to the top of this 
rig.  Then saw a vertical slot in the upper 2x4, coming up from the 
cener hole, to admit the 3rd fletch.

It occured to me while doing the figure above that this same type of jig 
could be used to ease fletching crossbow quarrels - if straight fletches 
are OK.  You'd just have to make it smaller and make sure the size of 
the hole and the spacers are the right size for the materials used.  
With a little scrap lumber people could make a whole bunch of these 
things so they can fletch things dozens at a time.


     Tomonaga


-- 
A long bow and a strong bow,
And let the sky grow dark.
The nock to the cord, the shaft to the ear,
And a foreign king for a mark!

        -- Stolen from "The Song of the Bosonian Archers" --
               By Robert E. Howard, who should be
                 the patron saint of Ansteorra


______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
============================================================================
Go to http://lists.ansteorra.org/lists.html to perform mailing list tasks.