Chapter 046: With the tree as the bow, the giant weapon
The bow is an ancient energy-storage weapon, consisting of elastic bow blades and flexible bow strings.
If weapons are extensions of human arms, then bows and arrows can be said to be the farthest extension of human hands before the birth of firearms.
When the string is excited and the arrow is fired, it can reach far.
The invention of the bow and arrow has enabled humans to kill targets accurately and effectively at long distances. It is easy to carry and use, and can prepare a large number of arrows for continuous shooting. It has been an important equipment for ancient armies and hunters since its birth.
In this harsh environment, a hunting bow would never be more useful to Lin Shuhang.
The method of making a hunting bow is not complicated. You only need an elastic wooden stick or bamboo piece, bend it and tie animal sinew or hemp rope to both ends.
For a hunter with Lin Shuhang's physique, if he wants to hunt the creatures in the giant forest, he must use an enlarged version of a heavy hunting bow!
This kind of heavy hunting bow does not need to be exquisite or complicated, but it must ensure that it can kill a creature of the same size as himself within a distance of 300 meters with one blow. Otherwise, Lin Shuhang cannot guarantee whether the surviving prey will attack him.
"I hope I can find suitable materials for making bows!"
Lin Shuhang carried his stone hammer and walked through the fog-shrouded giant forest, looking for suitable bow-making materials for himself.
At first, Lin Shuhang's first thought of bow-making material was bamboo. This material was extremely elastic and he often used it to make bows when he was a child.
Bamboo is the most widely distributed plant in the world, found in tropical and subtropical areas. It didn't take long for Lin Shuhang to find a bamboo forest.
The bamboos here are much larger than those outside. The thickest ones can grow as long as a water tank, and the thinnest ones can be as thick as a bucket.
Lin Shuhang used a stone hammer to break a piece of bamboo. After splitting it into pieces, he held it in his hand and tried it. The bamboo pieces were as soft as noodles and the elasticity was not suitable for him at all.
"No, it's too soft! We need to think of ways to increase the stiffness of the bow limbs."
A bow made of a single layer of bamboo does not have much lethality. If you want to increase the lethality, you must use lamination technology.
What is lamination? As the name suggests, lamination uses an adhesive such as isinglass to bond several layers of bamboo slices to each other.
The bow made in this way not only has high hardness and strong elasticity, but also has great lethality.
Compared with simple single-layer bows, laminated bows not only require professional tools and equipment, but also require the maker to have corresponding skills and knowledge, which is unrealistic for Lin Shuhang at this stage.
"No, we can't make a laminated bow without professional tools and equipment!"
Lin Shuhang was in trouble and soon gave up the idea of using bamboo to make a hunting bow.
Bamboo is not the only material that can be used to make bows. Wood can also be used to make bows. For example, the British longbow, which was born in the Middle Ages, has a bow body bent from wood.
During the Hundred Years' War between England and France in the 14th and 15th centuries, the longbow had always been the main weapon of British archers.
This hard bow, which can be up to 2 meters long, has a maximum range of an astonishing 500 meters and can effectively kill armored targets within 200 meters. It was "a very terrifying long-range weapon" at the time and the absolute king of projectile weapons in the cold weapon era.
!
The production method of the English longbow is simple, but it has high requirements on materials.
Since the length of the longbow is directly related to the range and power of the arrow, English longbows are generally made of hard woods such as elm, ash, and oak.
In order to make the hardwood for the English longbow, Lin Shuhang had to bite the bullet and continue deep into the rainforest.
As the largest and most mysterious area in the Titan continent, the giant forest contains tens of thousands of different types of magical vegetation.
It is no exaggeration to say that as long as plants exist on the earth, no matter how rare they are, you can find traces of them here.
Unlike the Turtle Island rainforest, although the number of plants here is numerous, it is not as dense as the vegetation on Turtle Island.
This is mainly because the sky is blocked by some huge ancient trees and the sunlight cannot reach the ground.
In this environment, the fight between plants is very cruel!
In order to absorb a little bit of sunlight, every plant here is struggling to grow.
Just as the best soldiers often come from the cruelest battlefields, the forests that lack the most sunshine can breed the tallest trees!
Looking around, in the giant forest shrouded in fog all year round, there are huge and shocking giant plants everywhere.
They are deeply rooted in the hard earth, like tall buildings, blocking the sky airtight.
Lin Shuhang was like a country bumpkin who had just entered the metropolis. Everything he saw was a surprise.
Trembling all the way, he carefully walked through the dense vegetation, looking for hardwood that could be used to make a hunting bow.
Finally, Lin Shuhang stopped in front of a strange big tree.
This tree had obviously been struck by lightning. It had no leaves on it and had been dead for many years.
Lin Shuhang could not tell the species of this tree. But judging from the branches that fell to the ground, this tree was hard and uniform in texture. It was a high-quality material for making English longbows.
Of course, Lin Shuhang couldn't make a bow out of the entire tree, so he climbed up the tree and chopped off a branch with a stone hammer.
This branch is as thick as a ramen bowl, about 20 meters long, and fairly straight.
Lin Shuhang carried the branch back to the camp, peeled off the bark, and obtained a piece of bow material with a diameter of about 30 centimeters.
It is said that sharpening a knife is as good as chopping wood. In order to sharpen the bow body, Lin Shuhang had to make a new stone axe.
This took him almost two hours.
After the stone ax was finished, Lin Shuhang took a short rest and began to trim the bow blank.
The production of the English longbow pays attention to the combination of soft and hard, that is, half sapwood and half wood core. The hard and tensile sapwood part of the wood is used as the outside of the bow arm, and the soft and compression-resistant wood core is used as the inside of the bow arm. The soft and hard parts are
Combined, it gives elasticity a carrier for energy storage.
Through continuous cutting, Lin Shuhang used a stone ax to trim the material into a bow body that was thick in the middle and thin at both ends, shaped like a shoulder pole.
The biggest difficulty in making a bow from wood is that it is impossible to ensure uniform elasticity of the bow body, because naturally grown wood is difficult to be completely uniform. Some places may be harder and some may be softer. Just uniform appearance may not necessarily mean uniform strength. This needs to be done through
Check by bending test.
In order to make the bow body evenly elastic, Lin Shuhang used a stone ax to constantly trim the bow body. This was a rather tedious process that tested the patience of the bow maker.
Fortunately, Lin Shuhang was very patient. After repeated observations and adjustments, Lin Shuhang was able to roughly adjust his arched back after two hours.