My thinking being that it's still miles better than what primitive peoples had anyway, and it's very comfortable to draw back and shoot and very durable indeed.

Although it may be counter intuitive this is actually not true. Paracord is a horrible bowstring. It stretches far too much and only the inner core is longitudinal strands. The mantle does add strength but far too much mass for the amount of strength gained. On top of that Nylon stretches a lot. Further robbing efficiency. With a 550 paracord string your bow could be shooting the equivalent of a 10-20# lower weight bow for the same amount of draw effort. I could send you a dynema string that would blow it out of the water. And increase your bows efficiency by a considerable amount if you wish.

A good linen, silk, hemp or many other natural fiber string will be far lighter for the same mass and shoot far harder.

While I’m destroying dreams here, the thick strings being better at close range is absolute horse sh!t.

Thicker strings are found on Persian composites most likely because they had such ridiculously high early draw weight combined with the extreme difficulty in stringing these heavily reflexed/recurved short bows and with the fact that a broken string in battle doesn’t mean you go hungry, it means you die.

Lastly, these bows are quite unstable which is one reason I’ve never pursued them; they are too specialized for me. A heavily recurved/reflex bow can flip in your hand on the shot and shed it’s string leading to potentially breaking the bow. With a Yew longbow this isn’t such a big deal. Grab another piece of wood and carve a bow. But some of the composites take 6 months to a year to make each. In some of these cultures if the bow broke due to bowyer mistakes the bowyer was killed. Another reason to have a bigger string than needed lol. So all of these aspects come into play when discussing this subject.


Because there’s such a high amount of energy storage you can sort of get away with a thicker, heavier strings on Persian bows. Even if it slows their bows down, which it does, it’s the best trade off for the needs of ancient archers in the realities of longer war campaigns. Lose some speed> Lose some blood.

As for the Egyptians using thinner strings this is probably because they used triangular composite bows which have much lower early draw weight and energy storage. Also much, much easier to string and less likely to blow your string out like the crazy pop of the Indo-Persian design.




Just in case you're curious why they are so unstable. Look at the reflex on that beast. Imagine trying to string a 100 pound warbow with that much reflex. Lol.

MirkoSling wrote on Jan 13^th, 2021 at 7:28pm:


Negative it's just waxed nylon. Send me your address and bow info and I'll send you a dyneema string if you want.

AncientCraftwork wrote on Jan 14^th, 2021 at 3:48am:


Hopefully you took that in the way it was meant J. 

FWIW true bow speed on trad bows is extremely hard to measure even with a shooting machine.  By hand it's virtually impossible.  There are so many variables. I won't go into details or it would be even longer than the last post.  But It's a good bow. I mean no offense. The info is there if someday you or someone else need it. 

Mariano hopefully you also took that in the way it was meant lol. I'm very too the point some times but the offer still stands.

If you have a phone that can record audio, you can measure the speed.  In a quiet area, shoot through two pieces of paper a known distance apart.  Use Audacity or some other audio program to measure the time between the two sounds, and you know distance and time... thus you know the speed of your arrow. 

There's enough momentum that the first piece of paper won't slow the arrow down significantly, but if you want to take it to the next level, you can subtract out the effect of the paper too. Simply repeat the same test again with a 3rd sheet of paper in front of the other two to figure out how much of an effect one sheet of paper has on the velocity.

If you have a chrony, that's probably better... it's certainly less work, because the paper method requires some post-analysis, and a chrony just tells you the answer directly.  The paper method  should be fairly precise and easy to do on the cheap though. All you need is a few pieces of paper, a measuring tape, and an audio recording device... and some patience.

For me it’s always better to add the weight into the arrows.
Let’s take out air resistance because that is most likely negligible.
A 16 strand d97 string vs a 14strand d97 string the 14 strand string will most likely shoot the same arrow faster but if you add extra weight to the arrow for the weight loss they would be closer to the same speed.
It’s the same reason I don’t use string silencers on my bows.
I’d rather a bow that shoots a heavier quieter arrow than a fast loud one. But I am hunting so if it’s just for target shooting your parameters might differ.

They're wood nocks, part of the arrow, yes, not those plastic glue on ones, these are probably a little too tight
Paracord is not my final solution for bow strings. But it works. It's a piece of string.