Author working on the bamboo lamination.

Henk cutting out the shape of the bow on the bamboo lamination.

Some of the tools used.

Right: Henk working on the grip area of the bow.

The bow at full-draw.

The author with the blue wildebeest cow he shot with “Grietjie” the longbow.

By Rean Steenkamp

Not all bows are equal, that’s for sure. This is especially true for all-wooden bows. I was about to learn this through experience.

I have built a few wooden bows in the past. None were great and all had string follow. When I saw a fine piece of Osage orange with a strip of bamboo in Derek Nourse’s bush shop at a traditional shoot, I had to have it. I was sure that at long last I would be able to build a good bow if I used Osage orange, one of the best bow woods, and backed it with an imported piece of bamboo. The only problem was, Derek had already promised it to Henk du Plessis.

Fortunately, Henk heard me asking about the wood and decided to let me have it – under one condition, however, that I let him help me build it. This was no problem to me, as Henk is an acknowledged excellent bowyer and his wooden bows perform like laminated fibreglass bows. I agreed and bought the bow material, but it would take more than two years, and many reminders and invitations by Henk to visit him on his farm near Potgietersrus before the bow building started.

From the outset it was clear to me that Henk was a far more meticulous bowbuilder than I was. Every step were carefully planned and executed. Henk gave the directions and I would do the donkeywork, then he would do the finishing touches. It took three visits before the bow could be shot for the first time. All that then remained to be done was the staining and varnishing, and the leather grip and arrow shelf. I also had to choose a suitable name for the bow. The bow weight at that stage was 63 pounds at 28 inches, but Henk said it would lose a pound or two during the sanding, staining and varnishing.

I had spent many hours working on the bow and was not going to spoil the effort by doing my own amateurish spraying job. I took it to my good friend, Johan Smit, a well-known bowyer in Pretoria, to do it properly.

Johan builds laminated longbows and recurves, which are probably among the fastest in the world. The speed of my all-wooden bow impressed him, however. The bow outperformed one of my recurves, while my other recurve, built by Johan, shot only 14 feet per second slower. I was pretty happy with my handiwork, although truthfully it was only because I had been instructed by a master bowyer. None of my previous bows came close to this bow’s performance.

After several coats of varnish, Johan phoned to say the bow was ready. I named it “Grietjie”, after the canon used by the Voortrekkers, and since Henk’s latest bow, which resembles mine closely, is named “Saartjie”, I reckoned “Saartjie” and “Grietjie” were sisters and should have similar names.

In the meantime Henk organised a hunt at a farm close to his. He wanted me to test the bow in the hunting field. He organised the hunt while I was still putting the finishing touches to the grip. I got the bow from Johan on the Thursday, did the grip on Friday, and by Saturday I was sitting in a blind with Henk, waiting for a blue wildebeest to come in.

Henk wanted me to shoot heavy arrows and I used laminated wooden arrows I received as a present from Gregg Coffey of Javaman Archery. The arrows weighed nearly 700 grains when tipped with 165-grain Tree Shark broadheads. These broadheads have a cutting edge of two inches.

Just prior to the hunt, Henk buffed the broadheads until he could easily use it to cut his arm hairs. Henk always says that the broadhead should be so sharp that when you bring it near your arm the hairs jumps off by themselves. I spent a few hours practising with the bow before we left for the ranch. As soon as I could shoot a close grouping at 15 yards, we knew I was ready.

It wasn’t long before the blue wildebeest came in – a whole crowd of them. I was a little tense. I was hunting with new equipment and I hate wounding an animal. Apart from the remorse one feels when causing an animal unnecessary pain, the fact that a blue wildebeest sets your bank account back quite a bit tends to unsettle me a little as well. Spending that amount of money and not getting your animal is not comforting and certainly doesn’t bode well with the wife.

I nocked an arrow as silently as I could, pre-aimed, pulled back the string and let the arrow fly. It hit the animal about five inches to the right of the spot I had picked. In a split second all the animals were gone.

I was fairly perturbed, since it seemed to me I had shot too high and I could see part of the arrow sticking out of the animal. Things moved too fast and I did not know how much of the arrow had penetrated the animal.

I was worrying needlessly. The wildebeest expired after running about 250 yards. I had shot it through the liver. The Tree Shark with its two-inch blade had cut a highway through the animal and made sure that I got my prey, marginal shot or not. It was also very easy to find the wildebeest, as it left a pronounced blood trail. The arrow cut through ribs on entering and penetrated the skin enough on the other side to leave a double blood trail.

Although I felt sorry for having killed another animal, I was happy about the meat, since my family eats mostly venison. And it was great to have hunted successfully with an all-wooden bow and arrows, which I had had a part in building.

The bow in the bowpress.