Wilson Bros. on Highway M
Photos of the making of a Black Widow
Bow
The photos here are from a roll of film I shot in the shop while in
high school. They were most likely taken in November 1969.
They document most of the steps in making a bow, in particular the last
of the pre-take down models from Wilson Bros. When we started
making take-down models the limbs were still glued and tillered in the
same fashion shown here. The limbs were then sawed apart, drilled, and
fitted with mounting
hardware before being finished. I don't have any pictures from
the making of a take down
bow in the Highway M plant.
We moved into this building on Greene County Highway M a quarter mile
south of Highway FF in the last half of 1966. The location was a
few miles outside the city limits of Springfield, Missouri at that
time. I
don't remember the exact date the last bow was shipped out of this
building but it was most likely around June 1976. By November of
that year the building had been vacated. It still stands as far
as I know and for
many years held a Mr. Power Clean franchise. I have no idea who
currently occupies the building as I haven't been by that location
in several years.
For convenience I've provided a list of links to the individual pages
of pictures at the bottom of this page.
Please note that there are a couple of major operations in the process
of making a bow that I do not have pictures of. I've noted those
in the captions with text preceded by the word GAP.
Technical notes: What you
see here are 100 dot per inch scans of a set of prints made in the
mid-80's from the originals, most likely 35mm slides. Some were
taken with flash, others by available light. Since I was using
daylight film under a mix of daylight and fluorescent lights the color
balance of those
available light shots was pretty poor. I was also using fairly
slow film (most likely ASA 64 as in Kodachrome 64) in an Argus C-3
camera with a slow f 3.5 lens
and was shooting handheld so some of them aren't very sharp
either.
On my next trip to Missouri I plan to dig out the original slides to
see if they are still in good enough shape to scan. I am not at
all optimistic about this as other drugstore-developed slides of mine
from that era have faded very badly. Most likely the best source
for scans of these pictures will be the intermediate negatives
from which the prints were made - if they can be found.
Some of these pictures scream for touchup work with a program like
Photoshop or Image Magick, but I'm not going to that much trouble
unless I know I have the best scans I can get first.
Links - Here's a list of links
to the individual pages of pictures for convenience:
Back to main black Widow page
Home
This page and subsequent pages
are maintained by Daniel V. Wilson and last modified on 11 May 2004.