i hear this a lot. "i made an atlatl but i can't find any dart material longer than 4'."  well, here's a super easy way to join two pieces of wood, dowel, sapling, etc... together with a minimum of tools, materials, and effort. if done properly it will create a joint as strong or stronger than the surrounding material. here's what you'll need...

4 nails
a board
a saw (miter, dovetail, hack, or anything with small teeth and enough length)
glue (optional)
a wrap of some sorts (artificial sinew works best but just about anything will do)

we start by laying our first dowel rod on a board and bracketing it with two nails. make sure that the nails are straight up and tight to the sides of the dowel.



next, we lay our saw on top of the dowel with the edge closest to us against the nail that is closest to us. using this nail as a pivot point, we swing the saw blade out until we have the angle we want. for a good scarf joint we want at least 3-4'' of 'face' (the cut area). once we have the angle, we take a third nail and slide it along the dowel until it intersects the dowel and the saw blade. we drive it in and put a fourth nail on the opposite side making sure to keep them snug against the dowel and pointing straight up.




our dowel should now be nice and snug and our nails placed at the proper distance to act as our saw jig. now we cut. make sure the dowel doesn't roll during the cutting process.



after the cut on the first dowel simply slide it out from between the nails and slip the second dowel in and cut it as well. you should end up with two dowels with matching cut angles like this. feel free to touch them up with some sand paper or a fine file.




after dry-fitting them together to check that we have a proper straight fit, we can now apply a little glue. although this isn't absolutely needed it does make for a super strong joint.



now for the wrap. starting at one end about 1/4'' outside of the cut, we wrap tightly until we are about 1/4'' inside the cut, then we switch to a broad spiral that takes us all the way across.



stopping 1/4'' outside the cut, we reverse and, wrapping very tightly, we make our way back until the entire cut is covered. whipping at the end to hide the excess.




if using glue, give it at least 1/2 hour to dry and then we're good to go!




a few notes: if joining a long piece and a short piece together (preferable), make sure the short piece is the front of your dart. if you're joining pieces of differing diameters, then use the larger one up front (shorter piece) and the thinner one for the back (longer piece).

i hope this helps convince some of you to make your own atlatl darts. good luck! 

Chris

yeah, i posted that one a long time ago but, for whatever reason, some people still had a hard time grasping the concept. this is actually my prefered method.

I learned about scarf joints making cigar-box guitars.  It's an easy way to make an angled headstock to get proper string tension over the nut.

This is also the basic technique (slightly more complicated) for making "footed" arrows.  That's arrows which have a section of hardwood grafted onto the front third or so.

They can also be locked scarf joints with no glue required. in the center of each scarf face carve a small divot 1/2 of a bb or bit of gravel deep. place two halves together with locking bb/gravel in the middle and wrap with string ... darts can then be broken down for travel and then reassembled on site.

i don't think you even need the pebble or bb, i just shoved the two halfs in the scarf together and it worked fine, wood, paper, sting, nothing else

too thin. and you want flex.

Nice tutorial! Where do you get your artificial sinew?

im thinking the animal just helped paleo make twenty new weapons (and tasty meat)