I'd be interested

I tried taking a year off from using osage.  I wanted to try out some other woods.  Since I am building a bow for somebody else I wanted to use something that I was familiar with so I stuck with osage.

I'm making this selfbow for a guy on another forum.  I wanted to use a stave with some character and history.  I picked one out from a tree that I cut in April, 2014.  The tree was one that my grandpa had a deer stand built in it.  He passed away over 20 years ago.  The tree had slowly fallen over like a lot of large osage trees do.  There wasn't much left of the stand.  The 2x4 blocks he used for steps were still on the trunk.  

 

 

 

 

He used long nails to attach them to the tree.  The iron leached out into the wood and stained it.  You can see the holes from the nails in the bottom of the discolored area.

 

 

 

 

The stave has some gentle curves to it.  The ends line up with the center so it shouldn't take much to get the string alignment set.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The top several growth rings were very thin.  I decided to take it down to some thicker rings.  I roughed it down with the draw knife until I got most of a single ring on the back.  

 

 

 

 

I laid the bow dimensions out on the back of the stave.  I made it a little wide to allow for some wiggle room around a couple of spots with some grain tear out along the edge.

 

 

 

 

 

A few minutes on the band saw and its starting to look like a bow.

 

 

 

 

I still have a few more rings to remove to get to a thicker one.  Its a lot easier to chase a ring on a bow width piece of wood than on a full width stave.  That's why I cut the bow out before chasing the final ring.

 

 

 

 

One of the limbs has a slight concave shape so I have to use a goose neck scraper to remove the rings.

 

 

 

 

Slowly getting down to the ring that I want.

 

 

 

 

The entire stave is now down to a single growth ring.  This will be the back of the bow.

 

 

 

 

When chasing the final ring I go slow and make sure I don't tear into it.  I use a half of a pair of scissors to carefully scrape around the pin knots or any other bumps.

 

 

 

 

The end grain shows some nice sized rings with a good early to late wood ratio.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now its time to lay out the side dimensions.

 

 

 

 

Here are the two edge spots that concern me.  I think I will be able to remove them as I thin and shape the limbs.

 

 

 

 

 

After sawing the side profile it is really starting to look like a bow.

 

 

 

 

 

I sealed the ends and back with some polyurethane to prevent any checking.  I'll put the bow inside the house several days to help remove any excess moisture.  I'll post more updates as I go along.

 

 

Clint you make it look so easy that a bunch of these boys are gonna want to make bows.

Looks really good so far. How you gonna know it's dry enough?

I've heard it claimed that wood drys at a rate of 1" per year. That is a pretty broad statement because we dont know the exact conditions that the wood is stored in.

You would have trouble calculating the exact dryness of any particular piece of wood using this formula. I guess what we can really take from this statement is that wood takes a dang long time to dry.

As bowmakers we are asking wood to do some amazing things. We don't just want to burn it, or stick it in the ground, or hammer it into a particular shape or something.

One of the constants of superior bow building is to have the wood at the exact dryness. Too wet = dog, too dry = kaboom.

There is a narrow range of dryness that will produce a superior bow. This cant be measured with any kind of meter. Or math formula.

Develop your own system of drying. There's no substitute  for time. April 2014 don't sound like a long time ago. At least to an old dog like me.

Forced drying can be attempted with a stave that you have worked down to near bow dimensions like you have. Not ideal but better than building a bow with too wet a stave.

I made one one time that was pretty dry I thought. I put it in my Jeep on a very hot summer day in full sun.

Four hours later I checked on it and as soon as I opened the door I smelled Hedge. You know the smell.

That dry piece of wood developed checks all over it.  I thought it was fire wood.

I went ahead and made a bow out of it and named it Stand Back.

I shot it at an indoor Tecno shoot with it and no one wanted to shoot with me.

The guys standin on both sides of me couldn't concentrate cause they thought we was all gonna die.

I still got that bow and shot it one time at ITBA when it was 5 deg. outside.

 

Osage doesn't handle force drying very well. Did you fill all those checks with super glue? Hickory can handle force drying. You could probably leave a hickory stave in your car all summer and it wouldn't hurt it.

I got to spend some quality hours working on the bow today.  I used the belt sander to smooth out the sides of the limbs and reduce the thickness.  I stopped as soon as I started to get a little flex in the limbs.  Some guys tiller on a belt sander.  Its quicker but easier to mess it up.  Snakey bows are hard to keep even on a belt sander.

 

 

I reduced the limb width down to 1 1/2".  

 

 

 

Taking the limb width down removed most of the tear out on one limb and all of  it on the other.  The rest of this spot will come out during tillering.

 

 

 

 

 

I rounded all the edges on the limbs just a little bit and started thinning them with a scraper.  I want to get a gradual thickness taper from the fades to the tips.  I marked a thin area so I would know to leave that spot alone.

 

 

 

 

 

I kept scraping and scraping until the limbs were evened up and had a nice thickness taper.  Getting that taper from the start makes tillering easier I think.  Since I've been paying more attention to it I've noticed it doesn't take me as long to tiller a bow.   My circular saw blade scraper makes some nice ribbons.

 

 

 

 

 

This limb looks good and is starting to flex when pushed against the floor.  

 

 

 

 

 

Now both limbs are done.  Its ready for the long tillering string to see how it is bending.

 

 

 

 

 

I left the tips very wide.  That allows me to put in some temporary string grooves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I checked the weight on my scale.  I don't want to pull the bow back any farther than it takes to hit 50 lbs.   At this point I'm not bending the limbs very much at all.  I just want to see if  they are bending evenly and to check for any weak or stiff spots.

 

 

 

 

 

The limb on the right is stiff.  I need to take a few scrapes off of it to get it bending even with the left limb.  

 

 

 

 

 

I put the bow in my hot box for about an hour today to help remove any excess moisture.  I switched it end for end a couple of times.   With the heater on low and the door cracked it was a little over 100 degrees in there.  I had a good  amount of air flow going out the other side.   I plan on getting it on the caul tomorrow after another round in the hot box.

 

Gary Davis is one of the best to learn from.  He has a way of explaining things step by step that makes it easy to understand.  I've hung out with him at the Tennessee Classic and the Marshall shoot.  Have you seen his Rattlestick bow making DVD?  It's very good.  

I watched Gary at Mojam # 2. Learned more in those three days than I could have ever picked up on my own.

Great build along Outlaw. 

I put the bow in the hot box for a couple of hours today.  Some drying checks opened up on the handle.  That's a sign it is still holding some moisture.  I filled them with superglue.  They don't go very deep.  When I shape the handle and fades they will be removed.  I'll take a few scrapes off the stiff limb and then give it a few more days to dry out.  The checks were in the thickest part of the bow.  The limbs probably don't have as much moisture in them.

 

 

 

 

You make this look easy, and I know it is not. Great work, and I love the old work bench !

The workbench isn't to old.  It's just had a rough life.  It's made from recycled and left over wood from other projects.  The stained upright supports started off as a hand rail.  They were part of a trebuchet for brief period and then they ended up in my workbench.

I took it off the form tonight when I got home from work.  Everything looks good.  Its ready for some tip overlays and then on to tillering.

 

Get your bow out and start practicing.  Killing one with a selfbow is a great accomplishment.