For Halloween, we bought our son a toy bow to complete his Legolas costume. The bow cost around $6 at a local thrift store, so I didn’t expect much in terms of quality, and sure enough, after firing a few arrows with it, it cracked:

Rather than return it, I decided to try and fix it. I knew that simply glueing the pieces together wouldn’t work, so my idea was to stick a couple of metal rods in there, and glue both sides to them.

So first I drilled a couple of holes into the base on both sides of the plastic grooves:

I cut a piece of wire hanger into a couple of pieces:

And made sure they fit into the holes I had drilled:

Using some super glue, I glued both pieces of the bow together and let it cure for an hour:

I then inserted the two pieces of wire hanger into the holes I had drilled:

And used poured epoxy into the grooves to glue the rods to the plastic:

I let the epoxy cure for 24 hours. The next day, the bow was looking pretty good:

Finally, the moment of truth, I tested the bow, and it worked great!

My son has since fired many arrows with the bow, and it seems to be working very well. In fact, I think the metal rods have made it so that the bow bounces back into position with even more force, firing the arrows faster and further!