UNGAR REDWAY ARCHERY

About Ungar Redway

In a little fishing village on the Central Coast of California, there lives a man known as "Uncle Gary". How he came by this moniker is a tale of legendary proportions best saved for another time and place. In any event, Uncle Gary had a sudden and intense desire, one day, to fabricate a bow that was comfortable to draw and made entirely of wood. After some awkward attempts and dismal failures, Uncle Gary developed sufficient skill to make a rudimentary bow. At this point, the materials being used were common soft woods, after all, one must practice enough to perfect the craft of bow building before investing in the more appropriate and expensive woods.

 During the normal course of conversation with people at different times and places, the mention of Uncle Gary's adventures as an amateur bowyer caused an eyebrow or two to be raised. In concert with upturned noses and grunts of disbelief, accompanied by remarks that resembled something like "…(harumph), well, (sniff), really, you know you cannot make a bow from common softwoods old man, surely you must realize that…", etc. etc. ad nauseum. These comments were from people who never made a bow, they simply knew better.

This rankled Uncle Gary. Kindly older gentlemen don't get angry, upset or miffed, they get rankled. It only served to cause him to firmly resolve to continue to produce bows from common softwoods. After all, they worked fine, and were getting better and more sophisticated as time went by.

At that time ( and still is ) the primary material for the bows was California Redwood, or, Bald Cypress. He also uses clear Pine and Douglas Fir. Nearly one hundred bows later, some folks still say, "..it can't be done.."

And so, we come to the end of our explanation of the name Ungar Redway. It is an acronym. A combinant form of words that stands for:

UNcle GARy's REDwood WAY of making bows for archery.

A large collection of [LINKS] to other Archery Websites

Ggoven@fix.net

Footnote: Thanks to Rob DiStefano rfd@kneelo.net for assembling the marvelous old book "The Essentials of Archery" and releasing it to cyberspace.

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