Thursday work.

Hi everybody what is going on? Welcome to the sabbatical blog where I turn a hundred days of holiday into a plethora of painful projects. 

To summarise my position - Good progress is being made on the forgehouse, and before long I'll be working steel and bronze. Until then, I thought I'd make a crossbow. I've never really stopped to ask why, I find such questions can get in the way of blinding buffaloing on. 

There are three material choices for making a crossbow, when you are me. The first is a wooden prod, which is going to involve a lot of careful work and a whole load of luck to get right first time. This involves literally carving a wooden bow and sticking it onto a crossbow shaped body. Option two is to make a prod from spring steel. This is a much more uniform material than wood, so you can fabricate it with some precision and it'll behave as expected. Option Three is to use a synthetic composite material - a plastic that I can shape easily.

Well, if I had a forgehouse I'd use steel, but there are many crossbow making skills that are prod-material agnostic. Making the furniture, string, firing mechanism and ammunition. So it makes sense to construct a temporary plastic prod and then use that to get practice building all the other parts. Besides, I can make a second spring steel crossbow afterward so I have two to compare.

Remember when I said a "plethora of painful projects"? 

My three successive attempts at making a plastic prod have been a learning experience that I'm not sure if I was expecting. This past week has contained a lot of learning how to learn, so here is a smithing 101 lesson free of charge. Need a tool? Make a tool. With a long enough lever and proper application of force you can move mountains, by which I mean selecting the right too for the job can make even the most mountainous task achievable. 

This is all fine in the games industry. There are a lot of games problems I know the solution to. Heck, there are a lot of solutions I know the problem to as well. Being able to spot a problem, then diagnose it, and then find and apply a solution is a methodical process and you forget just how many of those steps you power through when you have an implicit understanding of the problem domain.
But now I'm taking my first shakey steps as a backyard bowyer and I've reached a new level of incompetence that I've not known for twenty years. For a more detailed breakdown, I'll post up the ashes of disaster and roses of success to the Lost and Foundry blog and save this space for the causes and effects of the process.