Tillering a Bow and Opening Minds

The Tuktut Nogait bow is starting to bend and look like a bow. I've been spending an hour or two a day working on it for the past week. I'm a little paranoid about making a mistake that I can't undo, but I've also been busy with other work, so that helps keep me from working too quickly. The slower I go, the better chance I have of keeping everything in one piece. The tillering is going well, although I'm still only halfway there. I feel like I want to put the recurves in the limbs before I go too much farther on the tiller. That will affect the way the bow bends. I also think I want to put the cable backing on before I try drawing it to its full weight. The original bow that I'm using as a reference was in two pieces, so I'm sure that it was never drawn without the cable in place. Although once the cable is on I won't be able to tiller it anymore, at least not without unwrapping everything to expose the wood again.

The photos of the bow today are taken while its set in the tiller. The tiller is a stick with a v-shaped notch in the end to hold the bow and notches cut to hold the bow string at two inch intervals. Mine is made on a 2 x 4, which is a lot heavier than it needs to be and the first notch is 12 inches from the end. So in the photos the string is pulled back 14 inches. While its strung like this you look to see how the limbs are bending. They should bend evenly with each other and in a gentle arc, that differs depending on the style of bow you are making. You mark out areas on the belly that are stiffer than others and mark them with a pencil to file or scrape down. Once those small adjustments are made you string it in the tiller again and keep checking. When everything is even at one notch, you draw it back to the next notch and work on it again, until you get back to 28 inches, which is the full draw for most bows. The fish scale is there to pull on the string to check the weight of the bow. Mine isn't ready to test yet, but when it can be stretched to 28 inches, I'll pull it to that draw with the fish scale and the weight registered on the scale will be the weight of the bow.

This afternoon I'm going to be doing a flintknapping demonstration for a grade 5 class participating in the Open Minds program at The Rooms. Open Minds is a pretty cool concept. Instead of going to school for a whole week the class and teacher go to the Provincial Museum, Archive, and Art Gallery and get to do all kinds of cool behind the scenes activities. This morning, they'll be with the Archaeology Curator getting a tour of the museum and hanging out with the Archaeology and Ethnology Collections Manager in the super cool archaeology lab in the basement. It makes me wish I was in grade five again. When I was in grade five I did a science fair project on catapults and ballistas. Dad helped me make little wooden siege engines by copying drawings in the encyclopedia. That's when I decided that I wanted to be an archaeologist.

Some of the seconds that The Rooms bought last spring are used in the Open Minds program. Its better to use reproductions than actual artifacts to show the kids how archaeology is done in the lab. It doesn't matter if they get broken or damaged. Elaine's labelled them all and given them an imaginary Borden number* for an imaginary site located in the Atlantic Ocean several hundred miles south of Burgeo. It reminds me of an e-mail I got once from a guy who was convinced that he'd found Atlantis while looking around Burgeo on Google Earth. He wanted to know what kind of temples and burial complexes I'd found while doing my MA fieldwork. I'll have to send him an update.

* Borden System: Archaeology sites in Canada are given a code that contains 4 letters and a number. The four letters refer to the site's position in a giant grid set up over the whole country and the number is the order in which that site was discovered within that grid square. Here's the Wikipedia entry and here's a fun blog where some folks are looking for four letter words in the Borden grid.

Photo Credit:
Photos 1-5, Tim Rast
Photo 6, from the Wikipedia entry on the Borden System

Photo Caption:
Photo 1: The Tuktut Nogait bow reproduction in the tiller
Photo 2: Marking an area that needs wood removed
Photo 3: The Tuktut Nogait bow in the tiller drawn to 14 inches
Photo 4: Elfshot seconds in their cases at The Rooms
Photo 5: A broken Maritime Archaic comb reproduction, with its imaginary cataloging information
Photo 6: The Borden Grid for Canada - the imaginary site is in block AB, south of Newfoundland

Cultural Products Seconds

Last week was an unexpectely hectic week. I had a couple of suprise orders that had to be filled very quickly.

It got me thinking about the Cultural Products seminar two Saturday's ago. A lot of my artifact reproduction work falls under the umbrella of Cultural Products, and I know that some craft producers are curious about how they can get involved with making and selling cultural products.

The end of March is the end of the fiscal year for Federal and Provincial organizations, like Parks Canada or The Rooms. That means that the money in everyone's budget has to be spent by March 31st or they risk receiving proportionately less money the next year.

The Terra Nova Harpoon was an order that came out of year end money and last week a couple people at The Rooms found extra money in their budget that needed to be spent quickly. I had some extra product on hand that fit what they were looking for and I refered them to the Craft Council Shop in Devon House for a few more pieces. Whenever I fill an order I always try to make a small number of extra items, so that I have pieces on hand for just this sort of quick sale. I also find it more efficient to work in bigger batches and you always need product on hand for shows or surprise customers.

Some of the product that The Rooms bought could be classified as Seconds. Seconds are the pieces that don't quite meet a craftsperson's standards, but that aren't completely rubbish either. A ceramic plate or bowl that develops a hairline crack in the kiln is an example of a Second. I don't normally think of myself as producing seconds, but I do have pieces that break or are flawed for one reason or another. I tend to hang on to them, thinking that I may reuse the material down the road. In retrospect, however, I've got a lot of sales out of seconds and they tend to be in the most demand at the end of the fiscal year.

Artifact reproduction seconds work great for simulating artifacts in hands-on teaching situations. The majority of artifacts that archaeologists find are not the flawless museum showcase peices that make good reproductions for the gift shop. Most artifacts are broken and discarded objects that were no longer worth the effort to mend or rework by the people who made them.

Seconds can be good analogs for those artifacts. If a museum or university is running a hands-on program like a sandbox dig or mock laboratory program for students or tourists, they may be looking for your seconds. Its cheaper for them to fill up their programming with your cast-offs, its better for you to sell the pieces than throw them away and the programme participants get a more authentic experience because in most cases seconds are more like the damaged and discarded originals than your best work.

Pricing was a little tricky, because every piece was different. Some were broken while I was making them, some were abandoned at an early stage of manufacture, and some were complete pieces that had broken after they were finished. (As an aside, almost every artifact an archaeologist finds at a site could fit into one of those three categories, which is probably why seconds make such good artifact reproductions.) The pricing solution that worked for me was to pick an arbitrary price point and create groups of pieces that I could sell together at that price. I picked $50 for my sets. The sets ranged from a dozen small stone or antler pieces to a single unfinished soapstone lamp. Since these were seconds I didn't really consider the time that had gone into them when I priced them, for me the value of the objects were based on the likelyhood that I could re-use the material in the future. It was easier for me to think about the sets in $50 bunches and I think it made it easier for the customer to organize their selections. In the end we mixed and matched a bit between the sets, but it was an easy place to start the conversation.

It is kind of another chicken and egg scenario -- it probably hard to break into the cultural products seconds market unless you are already producing cultural products firsts. But still, its an option that exists, and in my experience its been worthwhile mentioning that I have broken or damaged pieces to musuems shopping for artifact reproductions.

Enough of that. I'm back to filling wholesale orders this week. For my office work I'm going to work on updating my website. I'd like to add Paypall and a shopping cart. From a preliminary look around It seems much easier to add check-out options to a website now that it was 5 years ago.

Photo Credits:
Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
Top: Broken Bifaces/Cultural Product Seconds
Bottom: Collecting up seconds. The little groups in the photo are $50 bunches of seconds, organized by culture.