Found these excellent videos on YouTube about traditional Korean bowmaking, constructing the gungdo (각궁) of bamboo, sinew, horn and various woods. Unfortunately, all the videos are in Korean, the only option is YouTube caption subtitles (click on the little icon below the screen that looks like an addressed envelope, and select ‘on’, ‘Translate Captions’, and then English or whatever language you like). While the captions are great at producing barely comprehensible joys as ‘Longing stroke / the sound of shoes voc robbed’, they do mostly give you the gist of what is going on, and occasionally deliver real insights (the ‘cloven hoof’.) Anyway, get stuck in:

Half a world away, I found this excellent slow and steady series of English longbow making videos from Bickerstaffe Bows, full of explanations, detail, and seriously hot woodworking. Enjoy.

(well, I say half a world away. Did you know that Britain and Korea share a megalithic culture? That you can find the same kind of mysterious late-Neolithic flowerings in Cornwall and Gochang? You do now…)