100lb Medieval Style PVC Crossbow for Under $10 Part 1 - Shaping the Stock

Hey fellow backyard boyers, Nick here. I got a lot of response on my video where I introduced this crossbow. So today I'm going to be showing you guys how to build a 100 pound medieval style crossbow. It's going to be very similar to this one, just a couple of small changes and it should be a lot of fun. So here we go. Here's a basic list of materials and supplies you'll need to build this 100 pound PVC crossbow with me today. As we go on in the video, I'll go over each thing in detail and also offer suggestions to alternatives in case you want to try something a little bit different. First we're going to start by building the stock, also known as the tiller. Today I'm using a 2x3 piece of lumber. This is just softwood lumber, I believe this is Douglas fir. You want to make sure to find a dried and stable board. You also want to make sure that the board is straight and that the grain, as well as the growth rings, run straight. You want to avoid any major knots. Or if you do have any knots, make sure they sit outside of where we're going to cut away or in thicker portions that aren't really necessary for the structural integrity of this. If you have a couple of pin knots back here, it's not going to make a huge difference. But anything up in this area where the rail is going to be and where all of the load of the string is going to be, you want it to be very strong. I also highly suggest you use a board like this, which is flat sawn, so that when you hold it this way, the growth rings are running up and down. And you want these to be as dense as possible. The more dense your board, the better it will hold up. If you wanted to, you could also make this out of 2x3 hardwood lumber, which would hold up a lot better. Just make sure that the same growth ring and grain rules apply. You want this to be strong, regardless of whether you use something soft like Douglas fir or pine, or if you're using something like maple, oak, or hickory. What we're going to do now is just kind of lay out our basic template. It's a really simple template. Not too complicated. So first, from the end, you want to mark 6 inches, and we're going to use this for two measurements. First, you want to mark in 6 inches from the end, and then right in the middle of the board. This is going to be where we're going to drill a 3 quarter inch hole that's going to be used to tie the bow or prod onto the stock. You're also going to be making a 6 inch mark at the bottom here, and we're going to be using that to taper the rest of the stock. You can really do whatever you want here. From about here to here, the shape doesn't really matter. You can make it more sweeping. You can thin it out a lot more. What you do is entirely up to you, but I like this. It's very simple. Though it is a little blocky looking, I like it. From the end, you want to mark, or on the end, you want to mark 1 1⁄2 inches down. Take that mark and the 6 inch mark. Take a straight edge and draw a line from here to here. That will give you this nice taper to your stock. Next you want to go 16 inches from the front. This will become the full draw length of our bow. You want to go 16 inches from the end and place a line. Then you want to mark this line 1⁄2 inch down and then out at a roughly 45 degree angle. You can see right there. That's going to be where the string sits when you load the crossbow. Also you want to mark, I've just drawn a circle here. Basically you want to drill a 1⁄2 inch hole here, but you want to make sure that the edge of the hole lines up with this edge here. You don't want it to cut into the edge. You want it to sit just behind so that we can round this out a little bit. That way it will reduce string wear and also make the bow shoot a little smoother. Now that we've got our markings, we're just going to go ahead and drill our two holes. This one's going to be 3⁄4 of an inch. This is going to be 1⁄2 inch. It's easiest to drill it now before we start cutting things away. There we go. Now when you're drilling your holes in the stock, you can use whatever you want. I'm using spade bits and one of the things that I like to do when using a spade bit is actually drill into the piece until the very point of the spade bit pokes out the other side. Then I turn off my drill, turn the piece around, and then drill from the other side. That way I don't have any runout and both sides are clean. So you can see we've drilled our hole in the front and our hole for our trigger pin. So now I'm just going to go ahead and with a saw cut out the rest of my stock. Just this piece, this piece, and this front piece here. Here's what the stock looks like when everything's cut out. Now when you're cutting this out, it's important to make sure that it's wide enough. You don't want it to be too wide or you're going to weaken these portions here. But you want it to be wide enough so that our bow or prod will fit in here. And you'll also be able to fit smaller prods in here. But you won't be able to fit anything larger. And if this is too small, it may be difficult fitting the prod into the stock later on. So just to make sure that you've cut this large enough, take the little piece that came out when you cut it with your saw. I used a coping saw. You want to turn it so that the height of the board, you can see this is how it came out. You want to turn it so that the height of the board becomes this width. And as long as you can push this into about halfway, you've cut this large enough. These rounded corners will help us to align the prod once we start tying it down. Now we're going to be working on our bolt channel or bolt groove. This is fairly simple and this will take a little bit of doing. If you're good with a chisel, you can easily chisel this out. Though that can be a little tricky on some softwoods. If you've got a sharp tool, it'll work fine. I'm going to show you guys how I go through here and make my bolt groove. So the first thing that you're going to do is measure the center here, the center up here, line them up and then make a straight line for you to follow that runs right through the middle. The straighter this groove is, the more accurate your crossbow is going to be, the more consistent it's going to be. So here we go. To cut the bolt groove, I'm going to be using a file and a piece of rough sandpaper. This is 60 grit sandpaper and this is a mill file, but you could also use a flat file. All you really need is something with sharp corners and a 90 degree sharp corner. To start, I figure out where this line is and I take the tip of my file and I try to line it up as best I can. And I use it kind of like a chisel. I'm just trying to follow this line and make a groove. Now it's going to take some adjusting as you go because this is going to try to follow the growth rings here. And the growth rings, while they are fairly straight, are not truly aligned with my groove here. So I just go back and forth, working slowly, trying to make sure that I get this thing aligned properly. This is going to be the most tedious part, just initially getting this groove started. Now that the groove is slightly established, you can take your file and actually place it into the groove and just run the file in the cutting direction. You don't need to do this a lot. Just a few times to really get this established. I'm going to go in both directions. You want to make sure that you're working evenly so that this groove is nice and even. Now that the groove is established, we can start working on really making it deeper. When it's finished, we want it to be a little over an eighth of an inch deep. Not too deep so that when the string comes up, it goes over the bolt, but deep enough so that the bolt tracks well, holds in here well, and that the string contacts the bolt about midway. You have a couple options here. You can wrap some sandpaper around your file here, or you can get a scrap block of wood, as long as it has 90 degree corners, you can place it into your sandpaper and use it as a sanding block. Now I like using this because it's kind of hard to get into this end with a file. It's also kind of hard to manage this piece of wood, and you also want the sandpaper to be creased and sharply creased along this whole edge. Otherwise, it's going to really round out your groove and parts and make a nice sharp groove in others. All you do is you line it up in your groove and sand. So I'll show you what this looks like when it's done. All right, so now the groove is pretty much finished. To complete it, you just want to take your sandpaper. Instead of going straight in, you want to kind of lean it over to each side. You don't need to do that a lot. You can see this side is now nice and rounded, and this side is still a little angular. You just want to rub from side to side just to round out this groove. There you go. Now the groove is done. All that's left to do is to sand this down smooth so that we can finish it. All right, here's the finished stop. So I went ahead and sanded everything smooth. I rounded off the edges. Any sharp edges, I just round it off. You also want to make sure that when you get right in here, you want to really round off these corners. And you want to round off the corners in all directions. You don't want any sharp edges here because that's going to cut up your string and really reduce your string life. And this type of lock inherently has a lower string life. So you're going to need to replace your string or at least monitor and maintain your string more often. But it's not a bad thing, and you can work around it. Just make sure that this is nice and smooth and everything's rounded off. Once we finish this, I'm going to actually re-sand it and re-smooth it and apply finish a couple times to harden up this wood. You can see everything's nice and rounded. So now I'm going to apply a wood stain. Now, normally I use leather stain or leather dye or shoe polish, depending on what color I want. And then I apply my finish separately. One thing to keep in mind is that shoe polish usually has waxes in it. So this won't be compatible with a lot of finishes. But I usually use shellac, and shellac goes on pretty much anything. So I'm just going to go ahead and apply my shoe polish. Here you can see right off the bat, it looks a lot better. So I'm going to go ahead, finish this off, and I'll show you what it looks like. I've gone ahead and finished up the stock. I finished staining it, and I sealed it with three coats of shellac. You can see, I think it came out really nice. So I'm going to let this dry. While we're letting it dry, we're going to work on the different attachments. We're going to work on the trigger lever, the safety, the stirrup, and the bolt clip. Here we go.