Yumi making: bow drying and shaping (2nd Yumi)

I let the yumi dry for 2 days. I set up hari-dai and started very gently to stretch the upper limb, pumping it up and down 15cm, each time a little bit lower. The bow gave in but the resistance was unexpectedly high. For comparison I stretched my 20kg yumi and it felt like the […]

Yumi making: glueing the full bow (2nd Yumi)

Hibernation ended in Ireland on one of January’s Friday (with the PM’s announcement on dropping almost all restrictions). On Saturday we got together with the group and on Sunday we had a first Kyudo practice in almost 2 years. It is now taking place weekly and is going very well, even if we lost some […]

Growing madake / moso bamboo from seeds in Ireland

Not sure why exactly but the prices for bamboo went up in the last 1-2 years. I know this happened with the timber / wood, maybe bamboo falls under this category. Anyway I was interested in growing bamboo myself – after all, Japanese bamboo (madake) is harvestable for yumi making at 3 to 5 years […]

Yumi making – finishing core and faces (2nd yumi)

Once the workshop and tools were in place I continued the work on the yumi. I put a long straight wooden rail into the vice, tied the core to it at one end so it didn’t slide, and worked with the bailey plane to flatten the core. This was in the end more accurate than […]

How to shave your forearm

Hisashiburi. The year 2020 lasted a week it seems – it flew so fast. I made little progress on the yumi; I got stuck on making the seki ita – I could not cut the bloody acacia wood that I planned to use for it. Acacia is very hard and resistant to all saws that […]

New gomu-yumi

The first (failed) yumi was taking space in the attic, I didn’t want it to lay around and get old. I also didn’t want to just throw it out, so I thought I’d make few gomu yumi from it. First I cut it to smaller chunks, tha would have the joint present and no broken […]

2nd yumi – core

The new core consists of two outer hardwood strips (mahogany?) and four inner strips made of bamboo. I thought about adding another strip made of (hard? soft?) wood right in the center but the core would get too thick – right now it is matching with the faces (sticking out by a 1-2mm each end) […]

Back to work

It’s been a while. Time flies when you’re having fun, and certainly having a small child is a lot of fun. Now I have more time so I went back to the attic to restart the yumi project. The first yumi didn’t really work out and was not salvageable so I decided to make gomu […]

Bokken (side project)

This post is not related to Kyudo but it touches on working with oak using Japanese tools and rabbit hide glue, so I’ll include it in this blog. My kid asked me for a Japanese sword last week. I had some oak strips left overs from yumi making that would be suitable, and some spare […]

Urushi (漆)

Below is a dump of information that I’ve gathered from many different sources on the topic of Urushi lacquer over last few weeks. As the amount of data is huge, and coming from multiple sources, there is some duplication / repetition of the main points. Which is not a bad thing as it confirms that […]

majikkunotecho

Kuydo, Japanese, Ireland