ARROWS!

So, today a handful of us gathered to assemble the arrows that our archery marshal had purchased for us a while ago.

So, 100 shafts, knocks, heats and feather sets, all in one place...

What could possibly go wrong?

Sigh...

Well, it wasn't that things went wrong from the start. I just wanted expecting to have Derega hand me a fine-point sharpie and say "start lettering". And no, this wasn't just numbering the shafts. Each shaft now has inscribed on its side:

                     Province of Mooneschadowe
                   Set 1  # 1

8 sets
12 arrows each
and a few extras

Our archery marshal is a real task master.
(the above said in good humor).

We broken the process down, first shorting out the shafts into sets of 12, and then taken each set and lettering them, Derega took the odd numbers, I took the evens. It actually wasn't that bad of a process, but there were a few breaks involved.

Tigernach arrived not long after us, and started walking through the next steps in the process with Liliana and Derega while I kept lettering the last few sets.

We had a small panic moment when Tigernach thought we had different sized shafts. Okay, some of us had slightly larger panic moments, specifically Derega who has been fighting to keep this archery on track from the first day of the order. Not long after this, Snyder and Sky arrived, and Sky (in his usual fashion) heard what was going on and promptly volunteered "I have a gauge at home that would measure these" We rushed him back out the door with all sue haste so that we could decide if these shafts were different sizes, or if our eyes were playing tricks on us.

He returned a short while later, and after some walking around, measuring shafts and looking at the grains (and a few other things that I wasn't 100% sure I understood), Tigernach proclaimed that they were, in fact, all the same size. We wound up deciding that a few of his tools were a little more worn out than he had though, but we switched out blades and straightened things in short order, and before long, we had a good little system going.

Tigernach and Sky were tapering the ends down for the heads and nocks, while Derega and Snyder use epoxy to fix the knocks on. I took it upon myself to take the shafts and stand them up in groups, so that the knocks didn't glue together, and the numbers we had so carefully put on didn't become meaningless.

As fortune would have it, I actually had to duck out early... (mundane obligations), but the chance to help out was well worth the two and  a half hours spent.

it will probably be another meeting or two before we can actually make these things flightworthy, but it was a good progress today so far.


Lord Ivo Blackhawk
Kingdom of Ansteorra
"God save the King!"