Howard Hill Bow from Movie "The Adventures of Robin Hood"

Jean Francois (Jeff), sent me a file of pictures of a very special Hill bow he has. This is a bow made by Howard Hill for the movie, "The Adventures of Robin Hood", and used in that film by himself and Errol Flynn. In addition to pictures, Jeff provided a photocopy of the document authenticating the bow. Unfortunately, this photocopy had chopped a word or two off of each line at the right margin, and was in a format I was unable to convert to Word. I did try printing it out and document scanning it, and then trying to correct all the copy and make sense out of the dropped line ends, but it was just too big a job, so I am simply putting the copies in here...

Here is this very special Hill bow

 

 

 

 

Documentation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Footnote on Curernt and Old Hill Design

Note in picture #2 of the above bow's riser and swells that it is actually much more like my idea of a classic American longbow or flatbow and the Hill blank that I finished than it is like the current Hill bows. I tried like mad to get Craig to build me one like this but never quite got the narrow waist swelling to wider limb butts that this bow has.

Here are pix of a typical 1950's bow and of the blank I finished. I wasn't able to get the degree of swell to the limb butts that this old bow has because the glass lams that Craig uses just aren't that wide. However, seeing thing bow really made me feel good... I wasn't crazy after all in trying to get what I saw as the true classic design.

 

Here is my old Pearson longbow... very similar to the Hill above, and next to it the blank I got from Craig.

 

Here yoiu can see how I narrowed the riser of the blank and tried to get that nice swelling to the limb butts, but the blank simply wasn't wide enough to achieve as good an appearance as on the old bows.

Dick