Full Stone Age Bow Build Tutorial

hey guys Ryan Gill here with hunt primitive where we entertain educate and inspire and on this channel we do a lot of primitive build and/or hunting videos just like this one so if you're new here do please consider subscribing but in this video you're going to be joining me in my backyard as this is going to be a rather intensive build on creating a bow with nothing but Stone Age tools and this is based off of a previous video that was shot on primitive woodworking tools and the dissection and building of those tools and I'll drop a link down in the description of that video so you can find it and watch it but we're going to be going through this over a fair period of time and we're gonna let you know how long things are taking different drying times that we're letting the bow set up to lose moisture lots of little different details along the way now you are probably going to hear a lot of background noise as this is a very involved video and I can't stop and cut every single time kids are outside playing dogs or barking cars or driving by airplanes go over so this is an educational video hopefully you find some good entertainment out of it as well so this is merely a documentation of the process of me working through this build so I don't normally build all my bows with Stone Age tools obviously now I have done Stone Age builds before but they've been rather crude we're gonna work through a really nice build some of which are going to be experimental techniques some I know exactly what I'm doing so instead of simply teaching you how the best way to do it is we're gonna go through and just simply document my process and naturally I'm gonna choose the methods that work best for me especially that line up with that previous video of primitive woodworking tools that's why I did that video first so anyway let's follow along let's get started on this bow so we started with this piece of hickory that I went and cut down green and it is quite nice and straight as you can see not super super straight pretty darn straight and it has now been about a week since I cut it so now what's important to me is we don't want to let it go too long and we don't want to work it too fast and the reason is especially this time of year it's just the beginning of spring and so there's a lot of moisture in the trees and the bark will slip off very very easily which is nice but the problem is because if we take the bark off immediately then the back of or any of the wood for that matter is going to crack because as it loses moisture very very fast the wood has no choice but to split and crack as the outside gets drier than the inside so that's why I've learned that you if you're gonna make a bow like this typically what we say is we take a stave we cut down the tree we split it out we keep it indoors we seal the back or we leave the bark on it and we let it sit for 12 to 18 months now that is a very good method to practice that's how we normally build our bows but in this scenario we're gonna make one that's a little bit faster and I would say primitive man most likely would have two or three bow staves going at one time especially because you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket if one fails you need to have kind of a back-up plan anyway so the best-case scenario would be to go cut two or three good staves or one tree and split them in two stays but if you get those extra staves you'd set one up in your structure in which you're living in and let it dry over a period of time then you have a nice dry piece of wood and then while all that's happening and if you need about you currently don't have one or need a replacement you're going to take a green piece of wood and we're gonna make this into a bow and it's probably not going to be the best bow but it'll be serviceable and we use it until that other piece that's been dry we can turn that into a good bow so hope you fouled along with all that alright and working through this project like I would a tape measure you may wonder how long to cut your bow save so everybody's gonna be a little bit different depending on your style of shooting your style of archery how far you draw the bow realistically the length of the bow is determined by how far you are planning to draw the boat back because wood does have a limit now that's a lot of basics of bow building stuff and if you want to know all the basics I'm not covering every little detail of the basics it's more of the tool application in the process of building but if you do want to know everything that there is to know about primitive bow building even with more modern tools metal tools I'll drop a link down in the description to my book primitive bow building and that's going to teach you everything you need to know about how to size your bow in judge your draw length so anyway for I have a very short draw typically and what I'm gonna be shooting for is a bows state that's about as long as my chin but because we're gonna have a little bit of loss on either end because as we cut this off there's gonna be a little bit of rounding I'm gonna make it just just a tiny bit longer but not very much and I remember we can always cut some off later but we can't add more on so if when in doubt make it make it even as tall as you are so here talking about the Old English War buzzer as tall as a man of course we're not drawing these bows back nearly as far as they were and we can get away with some shorter lengths quite honestly I could cut a bow that's all the way down to here and it would still this amount of bow is plenty for my draw length but I do want a little extra length for now and then if I need to cut it down later to gain a little bit of weight or to change the build slightly I can do that so I get myself a little bit of wiggle room and for me I'm going right under my chin and then just a tiny bit more to account for loss so that's where I'm going to cut this piece of wood off and I'll be left with the stage that we can start turning into a bow and the idea of course is not to just sit and completely abuse your tools or views the piece of wood we're not in a rush so we're going back and forth and see how we're just taking small bits out if we sit here and just beat on this thing we're gonna get exhausted we're gonna tear the tool up it's easy to make a mistake and we don't want to do that so now my method for cutting this actually down to size is going to be a slight angle a lot a little bit of straight down and a little bit of angle this way because what we were trying to do was cut this off to have a relatively straight edge so let's do I was saying about a little bit of losses you make some mistakes it'll it'll start automatically eating itself right back but as we get some of this chopped out then I'm gonna come in at a much steeper angle this will make more sense once I get deep into the wood because we won't be able to just reach in with the tool so we have to create a longer channel for the tool to come in and work on so this is obviously the side we're not using it'll be saved for other tools or go in the firewood pile depends but you didn't see how we can just remove this it's not taxing it's not hard work this is a spot that having a good adds could come in handy if you don't have a hand axe it's got a relatively round back this one's very comfortable and I don't I'm not a big fan of the compound tools because it's more the joints to fail and more things to go wrong and I'm not saying I won't use the adds it all because I very well may but see this tool is so efficient it's very sharp the edge is much harder than a bone or antler adds and I could make a stone adze but they are prone to break if you watch that from the other video there's a lot of problems so sometimes the simplest answer is the best answer there's no sense in over complicating this build this stuff works great and it doesn't need hardly any maintenance so we didn't have to treat a big elaborate build to create this we we just literally knocked flakes off of it and if you don't have a comfortable around back to peace to hang on to if you just have it blunt wrap this piece and leather and hold it so it doesn't eat your hand up now of course if you don't have any sort of Flint or shirt in your area that's when you're gonna have to use bone or antler tools or even Peck and grind cells they're not so good at cutting like this therefore they're more for crushing fibers and separating them over a period of time so right now this is the most efficient tool that I have and it's working wonderfully as you can see oh I showed you the wrong spot I showed you that there you go I was like it doesn't look like I took anything off see the further in that you go i'ma turn this sideways so you can kind of see it there the further in that you go you can start cutting more straight down and almost shaving this side because we want it to be we don't want it to be really crowned over heavy we want it to be relatively flat when we work with it almost like it was cut off with a saw I think that should make a little more sense to you how we are using this long channel so we're not fighting trying to get into this well we're able to sculpt this really easily it's not difficult to use this tool it doesn't take a lot of energy but there we can see now we can see the nice cut in that we're getting so now I can start working around the sides a little bit but you got to find that as different ways that you work this you might have to position rocks under it see this has got a little bit of a bounce to it now because it's not on the ground so something like take it off another stick Rock give it a little bit of stability you'll be back to a good platform again and this we're gonna be careful you don't want to take your first initial ones be too aggressive and end up running back in we're slipping and hitting your hand so all in all you can see the the speed that we're kind of working through this this is a cutting cutting a branch off it's about as big around as a oh well maybe a little bit smaller than the large end of a wood baseball bat it's gonna be a it's like a 10 or 15 minute job it's not long it doesn't take hours to do this but we're going slow anyway because we want to do a nice job we're not just hacking this thing out this is primitive precision if you will they see how we kind of make a little bit of a peak right there now that's an easy place we can come in and take out a nice piece of wood they're pretty quick so there you can see we're halfway through and they were actually really flat nice on this side nothing's split out we took a lot of care to get it to this point and now we can flip it over or just continue to work all the way around whichever you want to do sometimes it is difficult to flip completely over to make sure you don't want to be at a different starting place so if you do just score it just ever so lightly so when you do flip it over you know exactly where you're working and we'll do the same exact thing on this side until it separates and then we'll be done cutting it to length all right so we've ever chewed this all the way around very very nicely figured I'd catch you up just as we finished it off and see I just running straight circles on this thing and we could just break it off but I don't want to run the risk of splitting so for the extra two minutes probably not even two minutes take chisel we get a nice edge right that's a beautiful edge - yes beautiful that's what that end looks like so what I'm gonna do is just clean that up ever so slightly and that and that is it okay so now we're gonna strip the bark and I'm gonna do it awkwardly just to kind of show you at first and then I'll switch it around but what I got here is just an antler chisel you've probably seen me work with this before and what I'm doing is I'm it's not it's sharp but it's not like cut you sharp but it's a nice wedge of ground down what I'm doing is wedging this in between the bark and the wood now we don't want to hurt the wood I don't care if we mess the bark up but we do not want to hurt the wood so I'm wedging this in between and then just prying it up until it'll start to peel now this time of year the bark does peel easier and that's again one of the reasons that we waited a week because yes we do want it to peel relatively easy but it's still quite quite wet in here but it's not as wet as it would be if we wouldn't have waited that week so now you can just use this by hand and then also grab a hold of it and just pull these chunks off so now what I normally do is split a piece which just sharp enough to almost get you a good thing it's not super sharp is what I normally do is split a piece of wood and then let dry a little bit and then debark it but because this one is not terribly around what I'm worried about is and you can get away with this a little bit on Hickory having it more it's like a large sapling the high crown on Hickory you can get away with a lot of other woods you're not going to be able to but Hickory you definitely will something like cherry will end up fretting on the belly so that's why Hickory is such a great option for this but normally I would split this and then take the bark off so I'm gonna end up be since it's pulling so easily I'll have this whole stave debarked in about three minutes but the reason I don't want to split it like I said is because it's relatively narrow so chances are by the time I get down to the center of the bow especially it might split slightly off to one side I might not have enough mass in the handle to make the weight of the bow that I want to because if you don't have enough mass in the hand a little bend in the handle and if it bends too much you have to take material off the rest of the limbs of the bow to even the tiller out which we'll learn a little bit more later so instead what I'm gonna do is leave the handle a little bit fuller then I'll flip it around so it's easier for me to work that you know what I'm doing so what I'll do is I'll leave the handle a little bit fuller and then I'll stake splits off of the limbs but we'll show you that when we get four right now you can just see we're just getting up under it and just separating I'm not cutting into the wood at all all right so now what we're looking for is we want to look down the piece of wood keep rotating it and find the spot that's got the flattest amount of crown and it looks like it'll make the best back of the bow the piece of the bow that's gonna face away from you and so make sure you look it over really good if it's got a bow one way take that into account but you want the flattest piece in fact my turn it this way the bow actually has the highest crown but it looks like it would make the straightest bow but because the crown is so high I want to use at least a flatter side for my crown so I don't mind just a tiny bit of wiggle I just don't want a lot and so this is gonna be my go-to side so now that I have decided that I have a piece of just charcoal on the end of this stick and I'm just gonna take a light marking I don't usually mark a whole lot on bows except for on these round saplings because it's really easy to twist it and lose your spot so then what I want to do is I'm going to put a mark facing different ways to show where I want it's just charcoal so to come off where I actually want the back of the bow to be that way there's no confusion later I can flip it around make sure that it looks good from all angles and that's where we can draw where we basically want to split the bows thing great about that but we're actually not gonna completely split it we're gonna split some but not very much so now back up crouch down here to show you I want to reach out and I want to make this put this in even spots in my finger same finger joints and let this naturally hang not forced one side but just naturally hang and where it crosses right in the son of your chest that's the center of the bow staves so the center of the bow stave is right here where my thumb is this is where I want the back of the bow to be so I'm going to go ahead and put a big line right across there I have a habit of drawn a sea on it that I'll put a couple really dark lines just in case some of this charcoal comes off but it should be on there pretty good at least for as long as we need it to be so that's the center of our bow and remember we did that by holding this out and you can always double check it and that should fall right in the middle of your chest when you hold it naturally just like that that's how you find Center without a tape measure and you don't need a string you can just hold it up to your body so this is going to be the back of our bone faces away this will be the belly that in which will remove material but we do not want to remove any material now from this side of the boat only the belly side now also want you to keep in mind that if you are gonna work this out and set it up to dry for a large amount of time what we could do is if we have beeswax or even some animal grease especially if it's mixed with beeswax is we could coat the back to this once we work the belly side down a little bit and that'll keep the back from getting any sort of cracks or check marks on it but being that this is supposed to be a little bit faster of a build this isn't the one that we're putting up I've got plenty of old suits for that we need this one to work out pretty quick I'm going to leave the back exposed that's why we waited a week so it lost a lot of moisture and once we remove a lot of mass off the belly of this bow it'll start drying faster and will probably end up with some little drying check little cracks in the back but as long as they're the little drying check cracks it will not hurt the stability longevity or performance of the bow it may take a little bit away from the way that it looks but honestly you'll probably never ever notice them and you can really get away with that on Hickory it's not a big deal most woods little tiny drying checks aren't a big deal it's we have the big cracks but that's why we can't just leave it in this full form we have to reduce it to that SAP tube and on this side you can actually see that the SAP tube is much bigger and more oblong I actually had to consider that in my build that I've already looked it over enough I think we're gonna be okay I tested it I stuck a stick it doesn't go in there very far to where it narrows out but what's going to happen is there's that snap tube that runs right up through the middle of the tree and if you don't come right to that SAP tube or really close to it it's gonna crack on the belly side to that SAP tube so if you leave it in its whole form just like this and don't seal it or even if you seal the whole dang thing whenever it finally starts to dry out it's going to crack somewhere and you have no idea where it's going to crack and sometimes it will crack over here ways and then over here ways it'll go everywhere because it's got it wants to crack right to that Center SAP tube so to prevent that from happening we're gonna rough the bow out now and I'm gonna leave a little bit of mass and the handle I'll chisel that down later but I'm going to show you how many work in from the handle in a second and then create where we can split the limbs off most likely and either get expose the SAP tube go past the SAP tube or get really really close to it and that way when it cracks the place that it's gonna crack if it does it all will be on the belly side just go into the SAP tube and hopefully we won't have any cracks on the back of the bottle and that's just the nature of working with wood in general especially when you're trying to do it fast you may end up with cracks all right so now then that we have our center line mark on the bow and then this is the back of the bow and I lost my little charcoal pencil which is a little bit of a shame but I can get another one later if I need it a big deal don't need it right now what I'm gonna do is look at where the back is going to be on this and I'm gonna flip it completely upside down checking our side marks make sure we are upside down this is the center on the bow I'll put my hand right here I'll put a line hopefully a charcoal pencil we'd use that but I lost it but I'll just cut a couple of scoring lines into this and that's gonna let us know where we're gonna put the handle and then double check your work it's a little bit a little bit further out on one side than the other not a big deal and we're not leaving a great big handle like like a modern cellphone we're gonna work it down I just need to make sure that we have enough mass in this as we move forward that we're not going to end up with to light up above so again I'm gonna make sure over and over and over then removing material from the correct side we're going to kind of do what we did a minute ago by fact I'm gonna spin it around now that I've started this side and we're gonna kind of chop in and then shop back to that spot what we're trying to do is create a relief we're not trying to cut it half but once I get this set doing this kind of the same exact thing as we did when we cut it to size once I get it cut to that point then I'll meet you back here and I'll show you why I'm doing this and then it's going to make a heck of a lot more sense so another quick note here is I've swapped the bow back around so I was working that side is I don't necessarily want to cut straight down like I did when we were cutting in the back I want to bevel it back and forth that's not a big deal I just wanted to make a mention that it's okay to remove material from both sides of this notch as opposed to straight down on one side because we're gonna have to remove this anyway but as we get a little bit closer just figured I wanted to make mention of that so when you come back and you see that it's chiseled on both sides it doesn't confuse you but all we're getting down is it we're getting down to a level in which we can control the depth in which we want to start splitting the limb out and we can split a limb off this way and cut another notch here split this notch but we're going to be able to leave the handle section whole and then reduce that only as far as we want it as opposed to trying to split this entire thing in one shot which normally I would do but we do run the great risk of it splitting through the handle and becoming way too thin and the next thing you know we're with an underweight bow that's not good for anything except for playing around and shooting little tiny game but we want something we can go out and shoot you know big game with this bow alright I'll show you how it's gonna come together now so you can see this is the handle of the bow and this is that notch we cut and that's on the belly side and like I said we got a lot of distraction a lot of noise in the background this is something I can't really stop once I'm working on it because if we let it go too long it's gonna crack so this is a says a backyard build and keeping in mind that primitive man and primitive civilization they lived or around people talking and kids playing and dogs barking just the same as we do today just - the sound of the vehicles and lawnmowers such so anyway we cut this notch in and remember our handles on this side so I'm going to lay it down this way so you can kind of see and it's our antler chisel we need to make sure that we're on the inside of this because if we're on this side that doesn't then we just did this whole notch for nothing so you dig it down just a tiny bit more than you think you need it and we may still have to correct it in a minute but you got to take a good sized Rock just batani it with a stick you'll probably never get it to really go in you're gonna have to really hammer to get this started okay that's a little bit better so now I'll just move my line up because it does kind of want to follow the SAP tube but we need to also be really careful that if you cut too far into here there's only at some point you're gonna lose the strength of the bow but we still should have a long way to go but I think we're good but if you can just just reach that SAP tube it'll sweat it's so much easier sometimes the angle your chisel make the difference keeping in mind to that green Hickory is only cut a week ago is so much more difficult to split then when it's season let's see we got it there and I got a couple other tools but just a deer antler napkin tie and a piece of Faison horn I use for a punch spice horn here we go release the chisel now we can kind of Tom this maybe maybe not there we go alright so we pop this piece off Soto Nelly now it did not obviously split exactly where we wanted there's that SAP tube I was telling you about it didn't split exactly where we wanted it's still following it we might be able to split some more that's a possibility but the idea is you don't have to split it you're not gonna split it directly down into a bow you still have work to do from here but look at all the wood that we just removed that easily by splitting a piece off of this know what's funny is I can actually save this and make an alcohol fair out of it and absolutely will and I'll save the other side as well if it makes it but it just saved us from having to chisel off every little bit of that wood and we got a little by-product that we can use and now all right so just literally five minutes later it's all along our takes then take long at all we cut that piece to split it then of course sunlight doesn't want to cooperate with hopefully you can see what I'm doing but it's the same process I'm gonna find this good spot this chisel to slide in watch your fingers that's for sure much bigger piece I got it's a lot closer to the limb shape that we want a little size that we want much much closer there we go pop that right off there and split right down look like I'd be careful on this side I'm gonna end up ripping it and ruining the bow but you can see it split right down to the SAP tube if you can see that from there so what we're doing you can see the grain is caught here and it's really run a spin so I'm hoping that we did not split into this limb too far but I'll roll this one back and take it off well maybe I can't but now I need to cut this in to intercept this split oh yeah it's in there deep too so that's kind of a bummer hopefully not too deep but we probably won't know until we actually get it off there so don't force it just w-2 until it releases like that just about all right no reason I'm ripping this piece off get rid of it because I can use that for another atlatl thrower so you can see what happened here get in here close this side actually split off quite nice got nice angle because we're gonna trim this handle down anyway this side it dug in we're really far so you can see how that was just that little splinter that came off and that's on the outside of the grip so I don't care I think we have I think we have plenty of material here to work with but we're gonna get down to it where we do probably never want to remove anything else right here but I'll switch around the sides a little bit bigger so I can work it because I'm gonna go ahead and cram this in and take a good chunk of this grip right off okay I may go ahead and try to get another split right here but I don't know if we're actually gonna be able to get it to travel as far and as nice as we did this side especially with the risk that we have that we could again become too thin but I do have a little bit extra material to work with so I'm going to try a little one now we're not going to get a full a full width split but I can get up under here and just walk this down just like that when it starts getting tight tap it again and that's the one good thing about Hickory is once you get it going even when it's green you can typically split it so probably do the same thing here I got a little piece it might be I'll just grab it I can so we're going to be able to remove material off this bill I really pull in quite a bit here we go now you wouldn't be able to do that so easy if this is dry there we go but that's why it's good to rough it out and it's still relatively green now doesn't hurt to have a nice backstop back here too that I don't have right now but if in the future I probably will I'll probably move over close to a tree right now it's working just fine and see how much material we're splitting just by getting it started and peeling with the grain another nice bit of material so here is an important piece that I do want to touch on because somebody may inevitably ask the camera say why don't you use that stone ax that worked so good why don't you chop it and I'm going to show you why because remember the stone axe doesn't have a smooth edge so what we're doing does it remove material yes but it's all this fiber e bunch of junk up here and yes you can remove material with that and that's what I started using it for was just to kind of get me a new layer but really all it's doing is marring the wood and it's not creating enough of a piece that we can grab on to all we're getting this little tiny stuff but if we use this antler chisel and start a new one you know with the baton again that's when we can get a big strip to remove all right so now this is how it's going to work with a backstop so I stuck it up against my stone fire pet and now see I get a little bit more bite so a backstop is definitely gonna help you a little bit of spring to the wood anyway so then you can get a piece pull it off or infarct it larger bits of wood and we can chisel that all the way down why on earth would we once we get a fiber started we can just grab and peel it's a lot more efficient way removing wood all right well now it's good time to bring this out that somebody might say well now's a good time to use that adds that you made in the woodworking video so it's an antler tipped because we broke the bone pretty easily the stone breaks and comes out way too easily so here we are using antler and somebody say well that's a great job for this so let's go ahead and give it a try and see what happens all right you know as I tested it and it works it does the same thing alright so then why not use this because it does work you can effectively smash off enough of this but it's not terribly effective as you can see and it's putting wear and tear on the joint that we had to put together in the tool that took us hours and hours and hours to make not hours but several hours to put this together in the grand scheme of things is the other tool not only works does the same job but it does work better and it's not as tiring because you're not just sitting here pecking the ever-loving life out of this piece of wood so that's why despite even having this compound tool I have pretty much no interest in using it now we can upscale it we could make a bigger one we have to pursue it but why am i got allocate the time to making a bigger one of these when I have an aunt with chisel in a rock that has no no compounding parts to fail and it works so so well so that's the important part so then hey alright what are you gonna use this for well it's cut makes a nice gardening hoe so with your stave all roughed out just like this now you're not in quite as much of a rush as you were as soon as you pop the bark so just remember as soon as you pop the bark on this you're kind of on the time clock because if you just leave it for a couple of days in that hole form then you're gonna be riddled with cracks so you need to get it rough down to a point like this obviously we're still gonna thin the handle up because I'll probably get a crack in here I don't really care about it cracking and the handle doesn't bother me and the limbs are obviously still extremely wide and they're still still thick but I don't want to bend this at all now because this wood is still green so I'm not gonna try to floor tailor this because I'm just gonna damage the wood so now I can continue working on it continuing to reduce it down but we're not in so much of a rush so if you have other things to do if you need to set it up for a few days that's perfectly fine and I prefer to set it in a place that it's not going to be in direct sunlight yet because it is still freshly losing moisture because we just popped the bark off so put it in kind of a shady area somewhere out of the elements could be under our roof would be a good idea you don't want it to keep getting rained on and then dry out keep getting ready down and dry out so take good care of it and once we start reducing it down in about another week we're going to start laying it right in the Sun really trying to bake some of the moisture out then we can also use the fire to force some moisture out but at this point if you're ready to take a break take a break and if not well then we'll just keep moving on and reducing mass off of these limbs getting something closer to both shape because the more mass that is on this the longer it is going to take for this piece of wood to dry before we can turn it into a bow so if you're not in a rush you can just let it dry naturally over a period of several months or you can keep reducing it down so there's less and less and less wood to lose moisture alright it's been about a week I've just been super busy with work stuff I haven't got a chance to work on it anymore which is fine we got it to that position that we could set it up and we didn't have to be right on top of it and if you wanted to continue to work it down so it dries out a little bit faster you know probably shave a week off the build time you can certainly have just worked on it straight through but now what we're going to do is want to show you looking down the stave what you want to do is figure out where your tips are going to be and it's going to be it's really simple it's at the the topmost peak of the crown of the stave so it doesn't matter which side you look at your tips are always going to be at the very center highest part of the crown and the reason is is even though you can look down the state and say well it's got a little bit of wiggle off to the one side what if I just move the you know the tip over here to make it in a straight line well then the problem is is if you move if you're trying to make absolutely perfect and get a really straight line as opposed you follow in the crown of the stave naturally number one you're going to have excessive grain run out on one side and then on this side your tips going to lean because if you go off to the side you're going to put twists in it so always go just simply straight off the top of the crown alright so we're still just running the antler chisel but now we're going to start working on the sides and we'll thin down along the grip a little bit more and through here but then also in this area what they call the fades and then we don't have to go super narrow it by the tips that probably goes somewhat narrow but you know a lot of your more Cherokee style bows or South Eastern style bows I actually don't have a ton of taper so we're just gonna let this work out organically and probably as we split and work off pieces of this it's going to naturally start to give it more of a parallel limb shape so we're just going to build this thing organically let it see how it wants to turn out so there's not a whole lot of I think exciting instruction at this point it's more so we got to shim this up a little bit so it doesn't bounce it's going to be kind of the same story that we did before it's just removal of wood so gonna get the chisel up under it start tapping it in place and we want to make sure that we don't get out of control with a lot of our wood removal and dig into the back too far or pull something that wants to twist but this piece is it's pretty straight and it doesn't have a lot of grain twists in it so I don't think we have to worry about that too awful much so we're just going to keep working through just like we have been it's just wood removal as all it is and again now you may be wondering could you just drive in this way and split it down and you might be able to except for it's rather we don't actually want to remove a ton of material and if you get too big of a bite your limbs kind of get way too narrow we too fast and we don't actually need to take a ton off of the width of this so make sure you keep going back and checking to make sure that you're actually not biting into D getting too aggressive with it because we want the limbs to be a little bit wide we just want to flatten out some of the the crown on the sides the bow there's a good a good peel just be careful when you peel make sure it's following the grain which it is it's following it perfectly but that peeling is just a great way to remove larger amounts of wood so keep that in mind that's they like the number one takeaway on this especially working something like hickory this is why natives in this area in many areas will work Hickory because it's a very elastic wood and it's a very hard wood but the grain peels and see what I'm doing here is what I'm actually working I'm not trying to work up a splinter as much as I'm just trying to even out and catch any splinters that aren't lift it up there or easy to get so this is probably fine I was just checking it's kind of smoothing it out but anyway they're Hickory is a very elastic wood in a very hard wood but it will split and peel fairly easily so you know down here and in Florida they did work stuff like Cypress because the soft wood and in the Pacific Northwest they would use you would because it's quite soft and and then in the Midwest they would use Osage and believe it or not Osage is no well not only is it probably the best wood in the world but it's it has great not only great elastic properties but great peeling properties and splitting properties as well actually better in my opinion and Hickory so most people aren't used to watching Hickory split like this but they're also not used to using Stone Age tools on it now compare that to a very comparable wood to Hickory at least in perfect norman's would be Elm or hop hornbeam but if you use a piece of elm of the grain interlocks and it makes a great bow in a very strong bow but to try to peel it you'll never peel a piece of elm because the grain just interweaves you have to chisel off every single bit of elm wood and that's why it's not that it's not a good bow what it is but it's so difficult so so difficult to work with Stone Age tools that's why Hickory is actually a very good bow would not only for its elasticity but its East ease of use even though it's a hardwood very hard wood it's ease of use in working with stone age or stone tools or antler tools or bone tools with stone edge technology okay so in between working on the sides I'm still going back and working the belly down just the same exact way we did before we're just getting up under it and working it so I'm gonna kind of do it back and forth back and forth on this where yes I do want to keep working the sides down but I also want to work the belly down because we are still being very very thick really out here and I mean we're kind of thick all over but we're actually thicker out here now than we are up close to the handle which is no good you can probably see it's just slightly thicker so I'm working progressively just getting up under and peeling more wood so I just wanted to mention that I'm going back and forth coming to the sides to the belly it's just a slow process but make sure that you're not in a rut will you just keep removing wood in the same spot because you're just gonna get a big stupid dish and ruin your bow so always make sure that when you're peeling stuff you're looking where you're actually starting to remove it because if you just keep removing it from the same spot obviously gonna run into a problem so I just wanted to make sure I at least touched on that and then you can see how you some of these abrupt spots here you don't really like those and I don't like them not only will I continue to just split and remove this material I can come in from this side too and obviously knocked off that's not that big a deal okay easy peasy well that's a nice chunk but this is a good site here to show you and I'll flip it around just to show you because this one I'll just remove a little bit more material but once you start getting it down to where there's not much left then it's pretty much a straight you're not going to start over here to remove the material you're just going to start feathering it down in so you're just quite literally just chiseling off little pieces steady as she goes so we're almost there I got just a little bit more to do I'll just go ahead and knock that off and then we are at a point in which we can actually start trying to force try this because we're we're at a floor tillering stage but we can't floor tiller right now because it's still it's still too green it's still too wet we'll make the bow take set or string followed by doing that so we're going to force some of the moisture out of this so let's go ahead we'll fast forward a little bit it's getting dark now so we'll do it tomorrow but this is the point that we're at well set it up and let it dry itself out so you in the morning hey guys thanks for joining me in the tepee this morning it's probably one of the last cool mornings we're gonna have here in Florida and I have something here that's really special that I want to share with you and this is an original bow from Papua New Guinea and I got this almost thirty years ago now it's not being quite 30 years but we are getting awfully darn close to it being thirty years since I've got this in the set of arrows that go with it and it doesn't anymore it has is still a very very faint smell of smoke but I remember vividly how much the bow and arrow set just radiated a smoky smell and that is because in their huts that they lived in it's stored up in the ceiling and the rafters and there's a fire going that they're cooking in and it's being stored up there collecting that smoke but also outside of that collecting the smoke it's also being subject to a lot of heat and so when you're talking about it living in a in a primitive style of shelter being it to a teepee be it a wickiup be it you know a hut somewhere else by different names and you're running a fire inside you're hyper drawing everything that is inside of that structure and so especially in a jungle setting or even here in the East or southeast where it's extremely humid we have to realize that these people were living in structures that we're actually being dried on the inside all year-round by their fires and why that's also important is the bow that we're working on as a piece of hickory and hickory has a reputation of sucking up moisture taking onset or string follow and not being the best boat would however it was used on a regular basis but we have to remember that the peoples that were using them didn't just take it and leave it on the porch or leave it in the house or wherever that was subject to certain amounts of moisture fluctuations that they were quite literally coming home to their shelter hanging it up somewhere even an even in a teepee setting you could hang it on to this the side of these poles very very easily and it would be drying out all the time now in the western states you could run into a problem where if you're doing that you can actually get the bow way to dry and break it Hickory is very very tough to do that with but there are other woods you can get to dry but when we're talking about using a Hickory bow they probably performed a lot better on average than the bows that we make today simply because they were being stored in a manner that kept them very very dry and while it can keep your finished bow very dry at the same time if you especially if you were the Bell maker in your little community that you would have a shelter that has several bow staves or bows in progress at the same time and that's going to help drive them out as being in the structure with a fire going even a very very small fire in a primitive shelter liberal or just a small kindling fire very very small fire will warm it up and dry out a shelter very very fast so that's something that's really important and that's why I wanted to show this to you because it is very very significant for primitive cultures and building and maintaining their bows now because I don't live in this teepee all the time and I don't have a fire going it's not going to be super dry in here right now it's sitting on top of grass which is just gonna be full of moisture you know if you lived in here all the time and turned into a dirt floor essentially then you wouldn't you would have a lot more of that dryer air space in here as opposed to if I be even if I build a fire in here now it's just gonna suck the moisture out of the grass and keep bringing it up for you know a week or so until they've drived it out now that being said I'm not gonna dry this in here because I don't live in this teepee all the time and so I'm not in here to maintain a fire I'm not sleeping in here there's not there's no reason for me to keep it in here in fact it'll probably gain moisture because it's just going to be in a shady area that's not being dried by the fire so what we're gonna do is we're going to do it outside by a fire which is also important because if you do live in an area like Florida especially in the summertime you're not gonna have a fire inside of your primitive shelter so in a lot of your primitive shelters quite honestly down here would be more open air space with just that roof over top now it still is a great place to store your bows and arrows because they will help get dried by the Sun on the roof and also any fire you do have that's raising heat into that roof space but if you're not gonna live in a cooler climate we're gonna do a lot of this drying of the wood outside around a long fire so instead of in past I've made a fire and you can sit here and work it over and over and over but you have to babysit it and in this scenario we don't really want to babysit it so we're gonna build more of a trench fire and then we're gonna lean this up off to the side and we can just progressively get it closer till we find the sweet spot that it's drawing the wood out without scorching wood so follow along then let's go get that done alright so what we got going on here is just for your drying our boat stave and so you can see what I've basically done is I've put the the bow up on a couple steaks or fork sticks or even some rocks it's fine but I like to elevate it a little bit because if you elevate it it's going to capture a lot of the heat that's raising so if you put it really close to the ground you're not really running a lot of heat over it now what I'm really looking for in the fire is a very is a long fire just like this one it runs very parallel to the bow in itself and then once in a while I'll go over and I'll flip the bow around the other direction and you know just once every 10 15 20 minutes no big deal just as I'm outside working we'll go ahead and flip that around but I like to have a little bit of distance here this way I don't have to babysit at the whole time you can see I have a nice little bit of distance and I don't have any worry about scorching the wood I don't want a big rip roaring fire just steady and you'll realize even at this distance where it's got probably two and a half to three feet from the bow to the fire that bow will get very hot but it's not going to get hot enough to scorch it so if we get a hold of it it's almost too hot to touch and that's kind of what you're looking for and then you know it's a good time to flop it around but you'll be surprised even at this distance how hot that'll be and that's why you don't want a big rip roaring fire and that's why I don't put it right over top of the fire so all I'm trying to do is force to dry this wood so I'm not looking to I'm not trying to heat treat the belly at this point I know many of you may be familiar with the heat treating technology I have been heat treating boughs for a few years and that's something that I may very well do on this one but I'm not going to be doing it now we don't do that until the bow is nearly complete at this point all we are trying to do is suck some of the moisture out at a rapid pace so as opposed to putting it in the shelter that just has a small fire in it that we're we're hyper drying the piece of wood out we're doing it this way with wood and then one thing that I do like to mention is the rocks down at the bottom you do not have to have the rocks this is normally a fire pit that I have but I also stretch the rocks out and the reason I position it right over the rocks is the rocks hold heat so even as the fire dies down we're still radiating heat out of the rocks so and I will carry this process on for an entire day probably give you know not necessarily a day of rest but I will I'm not so worried doesn't have to be for many days straight but I will for try this piece of wood for several days before I ever start floor tillering it and as you work a piece of wood later on you will you will be able to tell if it still has moisture in it or if it's getting rather dry but we don't want to dry it so much that we hand up breaking the dang thing either but we'll explain more of that in the future so anyway this is next step on it and it's going well we've just kind of been at this here for well about an hour now and we're gonna continue this pretty much all day just carrying on the process of drying it out so getting about down to the end of the day burn this up and coming down every once in a while and feeling it gets pretty hot we rotate it around sometimes this way and sometimes we flip the whole thing around and pay attention to it way the wind flowing - you don't want to be blowing the flame rate up all in your stave but it gets pretty hot almost too hot to touch sometimes that's what you're looking for don't want to scorch it to death just want to dry it out all right day two on this one as far as I'm concerned you can't really run too much moisture out of Latika piece of hickory especially early on so we're going to give it a couple days to naturalize itself anyway once we're done heating it out so we're just keeping it hot pretty much all day long and just running every bit of moisture out of this thing that we can get so we want this thing as dry as we can possibly get it and then if when we start working it down if it's still not dry enough well heat it some more it's actually been a couple days and last night actually got impatient I wanted to work on it so quite frankly I just sat inside the house it was after dark and I scraped on it because that's a long process and there's no way I'll be able to sit and show you the whole dang process of now cleaning up a limb like this that we've chopped and stripped the pieces off and then scraping it down into actually a pretty nice limb now this isn't done yet but it is a heck of a lot nicer than that side it's all squared off and blocky and also very very thick so this is kind of floor tailored on this side here which I'll explain some of that in the future here as well but for right now what we're gonna do is we're going to take a rock these are the two that I've used thus far bringing the hair closer for you to see and the importance is if you watched my woodworking tool video you want like these I mean it's not a true 90 degree per se but these more 90 degree and you can actually see quite a bit of the the where that's on these so these are actually getting kind of dull now I can still use them but they're I've used these two on the other women so I have a fresh one here and it's interesting because that's the edge I'm going to use right there the you almost have to relearn how to you will use every single tool so I'm actually going to start off with one that I'm fairly comfortable with and the reason I like these blocky ones is because I can get my hand on them a little bit easier and they don't wear me out as much but now what you don't want is and I don't even have one here to show you is stuff that has like the the really sharp little knife edges on it because if you're trying to work and scrape with those they just crumble and break you don't get any edge life out of those thin little blades those are for like skinning and fine detail work this makes a perfect scraper and as I get closer into this I'm gonna bring their camera in to show you how it scrapes and actually how well it scrapes um you can see some of what's coming up but one thing to really point out is all the places that have like the Chop marks and the peel marks that's very inconsistent it seems like you'll scrape on it forever and just doesn't really come smooth it seems like it's you're just gonna be here for absolute ever and it's not because once you get past that really choppy layer and it starts to smooth out like on this side you actually can remove these beautiful curls of wood because it doesn't have that choppy resistance or that constant in and out it's like it's just like chattering across the edges so you'll see what I mean as we move on you get some really nice flake shell this side really scrapes smooth and I can remove nice would wear this side you can hear it oh it's kind of a cross fit and you just got to get through all of that now when you start having these lines I'm gonna bring the camera now so I can start explaining this to you a little bit hang tight all right so you can see I've already scraped some of this here but you see the kind of the wavy lines compared to this side you can see how much nicer that is so these wavy lines they they don't scrape super nice and if you actually keep following like all these little spots that we Jam the chisel down in if you keep following them they'll keep chattering so what we're gonna do is we actually turn the tool a little bit at an angle this way and then it this way and we'll just keep working back and forth so we're not pulling we're not pulling straight in all the time but we'll turn it a little bit more we'll pull this way and we'll turn it because now we're actually planing across those divots evenly as opposed to hitting them and keep falling down in those if that makes sense so like right now I'm kind of working it towards me and it doesn't matter which direction you use just whichever way removes the wood the best so right now away from my body is working really good there's other instances where pulling it to you where it's really well there you can see some of the wood removal coming off of that I think hopefully I'm gonna go ahead and try that new one it's a little bit sharper oh yeah that's gonna be really nice here let's see if we can't get up here close you can maybe see some of the curls that are gonna come off that that's a nice new sharp one right there and again same thing they don't always want to pull this way tilt it a little bit and change the angles on some of these now the reason that I use an edge notice when I'm actually going out to be careful of I may have to switch at some point I can try this side too actually the reason I don't use an apt end scraper is because all it does is leave all these grooves and lines in here and you can remove some material but these flat edge remove material very very well and it almost shaves the wood as opposed to just raking out like a two thing plane so I've always used these for my wood scraping kind of a different story when it comes to hide scraping and stuff but first woodworking I like a nice smooth scraper and you can do the sides as well with this so all these rip outs where we were peeling the pieces we're just gonna do the same thing and we're just gonna scrape those right out now it doesn't take that long to actually get it smooth so you'll sit here for maybe an hour and you could have the bow mostly smooth but that's only a little piece really the equation because then we got to get it to the point where the limbs start to bend and that'll be the next part I show you so make sure you watch into the next part before completing this yourself because you don't want to scrape too far or not enough but as of right now I'm just gonna keep on scrape and you're gonna be a couple hours into this and said and then when you can well skip ahead here in a second and I'll show you how our other limb over here is actually starting to bend all right so now into this what we call floor tillering in the process and and we're still really heavy I'm not going to lie we see how we're starting to bend and you can tell it I really still have probably too much Bend right in here so here's the handle and I push and you can see it is bending mostly in here so I do need to take a little bit more off the tips but right now this is actually very stumped we got this wood very dry on the fire now this side is the one that we just started scraping and it's definitely stiffer yet so you can actually see the top limb let's do that you can see the top limb is bending a little bit more we need to just keep working this down but it's actually not as far off of this limb as I thought so by the time we clean all this one up I think we might be in ok shape but yes it's pretty stout still compared to this one but that's floor tiller and it's going to take a little bit of practice to get a knife or you don't want to force it real far you're just trying to test to see where it starts to bend and once it's completely for coloured which we'll show you later once I get it to that point is we're gonna bend it far enough that we're comfortable putting a string on the bow then once we have a string on the bail will continue the tillering process but as of right now we still have a lot more work to do and it's scraping and refining this one over so we're just gonna keep doing that for the rest of the evening so I'll catch up with you tomorrow process the floor teller it's going really really well last night I cut that knock in so now I'm going to show you how I did it when it looks just like this I went with a classic diamond shaped knock inspired by some of the Cherokee bows and there's also a little bit of a reason why we went with the diamond shaped knock because we're working with stone tools and it's fairly easy to make this so all of that even some of those look like they're almost pretty darn clean cuts don't they and it's all with a stone knife so let's show you how to do that quick it's this back to bow hotel because it's dirty doesn't matter which side you really start on it I've had a little bit of angle back not a whole lot what we want to do is really look and decide where we want our nock to be and we can go ahead and score it with the knife that's my one of my bison skinner knives in this one I have used exclusively just for tool work so I use it for a wood and bone and antler I've cut all kinds of stuff with this on my videos in the past and so it's gotten a little bit a little bit smaller over a period of time as I sharpen it down a little bit and it works usually best just drawing it back to yourself you can saw with it some every material you work with responds a little bit differently to the sawing action this one wants to it wants to work pretty okay with that the other side I almost exclusively had to back-drag the whole thing so now after we start cutting a groove in here like this we're not gonna be able to just cut straight down because the knife friends at a room so if you see me cut with stuff before I go like this with the knife that Waldo's it out but the thing is we need to come down here pretty far and that's just not going to get us there so then what we're doing is coming up about where where the little tip of our side of our diamond off would be and we're going to do it again but this time we're Aang's back into so this way we're just going to progressively keep working and chewing everything out typically I did the other one last night the entire knock took me about an hour to do not just not just one like I mean the whole knock both sides in the edges so it's not that long a process with these stone tools think like it would take a lot longer all right see now once it's kind of bottom doubt and it's causing a lot of friction and you can't really remove as much material that you're just gonna go right here in the center between your two notches that you made and show you that here quick all right so this one's going straight in and then this one so you can see it's angling back in just a little bit when the hell we're just gonna go in and you out all that stuff in the middle and you can do it almost pretty much always change the direction and you'll chew through this stuff really fast now I'm just basically taking I went back down straight again and now I'm working this angle back and I'm meeting kind of in the middle I'm not necessarily in the middle but down at the bottom so just continue that process a little bit more we'll go a little bit deeper and we'll be ready to do the other side I've got about five minutes wrapped up in this one so far and I probably have another five minutes until I get it where it really where I like it but we're able to remove pretty good material with one of these bison skinner knives that I call them the reason I call them Bison skidder knife just because I put the several of these together when we went in did the Bison documentary and that's what we skinned the Bison with all right so that one's almost done I'm going to clean it up just a tiny bit more and then we'll show you go ahead and chewing this and off but for the most part it's just removable with with this knife you're using it as a saw per se and then here's the one that's already done a little dirty now because we've crammed it in the ground while I'm working that's pretty normal for me no big deal so it's kind of look like that by the time it's said and done but I don't think I need to really show you how to do every little scrape on this thing but how you're going to get the other side of your diamond is the same exact way you're just going to choose the angle score the line this and then we will just saw this through and take chunks out until you completely cut that off the other side it's pretty much that simple it's just cutting with us so nice [Laughter] see how far we're actually getting down into that pretty far so that's it and then of course once you have created that groove we'll come in on the side of it I'll show you that here in a second someone's we created the groove down then I'm going to come in the side and you can't really pry with a stone knife but you can give a little bit of a lift up on it you don't want to pry you just want to lift just a little bit not too much peel it a little there no big deal and that opens it up snake cuts more and then we're basically just going to continue that same process until it's completely cut off yeah you can see how how far along I mean we're halfway through it already and it's only just been a about two minutes so that's it I think that's probably sufficient enough to show you on the NOx and how we're going to do it it's not going to be terribly exciting it's just sitting and cutting again the end goal is gonna be to work it down to where it looks like this one - all the dirt that I cram down in it but that's what we're looking for all right once or for Tailored what we're doing is we're putting on a string then this is a sinew bowstring that I made and I skipped that process because it's actually a whole process all in itself and right now it's a long case we need to adjust it so with our Knox cut in the way they are and then this is it's basically I tie it off to where it's about four to five inches short so and we string at the bow is somewhat strung up at least close to the brace height that we're looking for but it doesn't have to be exact now we can always undo the the bow years.not or the bow line not depending on which not you use but I have a video on making a sinew bowstring I would like to say it's an oldie but a goodie but it's not really a goodie it's mostly just an oldie but it does show you how to make a sinew string and then also I have a video on how to make a rawhide bow string so I will drop that down in the description so if you need to learn how to make a bow string from natural materials so you can go do that but we'll skip it because I already have a video on that so then once this is put on and then we floor tailored it as best as we possibly can now also keep in mind that I do this for a living so whenever I Fleur Taylor one I kind of know what I'm looking at usually more than the average person that so when you first string your bow up it mane look quite as good as mine hang on we'll look it over a second so I do a step through method and you can also find that on my YouTube channel but on a natural bow string always and let the tension up a little bit nice the first time there we are we're strung up and you can see that tiller on my bow is actually not too bad it's pretty even so far now what you may find is that one side bends a lot more where the other is more straight and it's the side that's more straight or if you have a spot that doesn't look like it bends at all that's where you need to remove more material but getting it to this point can actually be a little bit dangerous because if you if you don't floor till it very well and you try to string the bow so then what happens you could accidentally break the bow before you every put a string on it and start tillering now in the tillering process in itself that's a big long process and I'll walk you through a little bit of it but I can't cover every teeny tiny little step along the way just simply because you'll be bored to death but as I show you the tillering and what needs to happen and how we remove wood to make it Bend very very symmetrically on both sides is what we're looking for you don't want one limb that bends a lot more you don't want one spot in the limb that does all the bending in a straight piece over here what you're looking for is a very elliptical tiller as you draw this bow back which I it's too heavy I can't draw it like this when you draw the bow back it should Bend very evenly an elliptical shape and that's what's going to be a good tiller and if it doesn't have that good tiller then there's a very very good chance that your bow is going to break so the tiller of the bow meaning it's elliptical shape is exceptionally important and if you need to know more about that again look down in the description and I'll put a link to my book primitive bow building it'll teach you everything you need to know whether you're doing with stone tools or modern tools it doesn't matter the process of tillering is the same and boom a 'king that stuff's very very important now I have not fully tailored this bow it is only to a point in which I felt comfortable bracing it which me putting a string on it in which I've got not even it's probably pretty close to the true brace height of the bow that I want it primitive bows I don't like to have a super-high brace height probably five to six inches give or take now when you want to tiller the bow and you're trying to guess on the not trying to guess that you're trying to see how the limbs Bend you kind of have two options if you're working in a more modern setup you're gonna have something what we call a tiller tree in which you can stand back and you can actually observe and you could certainly build a primitive tiller tree as well or you can have a friend and if you're in a primitive setting you should have a whole village around you so it's there's nothing wrong with having a friend that can very slowly and you may need to make sure that you let them know that they draw the bow back a piece at a time so you either put an arrow on or not even an arrow it doesn't have to be an arrow but just a string it's got an I'm sorry a string a stick that has a string nock cut in it that you can put on the arrow and they don't have to be exact one inch increments but what we're gonna do is do so many increments out until you hit your actual draw length which is as far as you draw the bow back but if you we just pull this back right now very very very high chance that it's going to break because we haven't done any tailoring and so what we need to do is very slowly and I usually start with a couple inches like this and once you stand back and watch how the limbs Bend you can remove material now I'll back up enough so hopefully you can see some of how this bow actually bends and I will point out on the camera where it looks a little stiff and where we may need to remove some material you so I'm sure it's not perfect to that draw length but I felt pretty good so hopefully let's go over and you've probably seen me put on the screen something that says all we're gonna move remove material there and I'll go back and I'll watch and I'll look at it and then I'll remove that material and show you basically we're just gonna scrape that a little bit we don't scrape a ridiculous amount we just scrape enough until that bit of would say try to take a guess and standing back and looking at this bow I would say it probably needs to bend I bet you a little bit right here and maybe maybe a skosh here maybe a teeny tiny bit right there that's just from my eye and that's another way of tillering is looking at how the bow is shaped when it's braced you want it very very even and then what you can do and this is more the rudimentary way of tailoring it's not as accurate but if you're all by yourself or in a survival situation or you simply don't have the tillering mechanisms as you pull it back so far and you keep track of how many lines you've drawn to so I would say ok well I've drawn two here and now what I'm doing is I'll draw that maybe maybe 15 or 20 times over and over and over and then I'll look at the tiller of the bow while it's braced and if the if it looks like it's a little stiff in the spot I'm going to remove material in those spots and then once it's looking pretty good again now okay well we head to four lines now the next time I'll pull to five lines and I'll do that all 15 or 20 times or so and then I'll look at it again has anything changed can make just these small adjustments as we go until you get to a point that you can pull the bow all the way back and so of course I have a fairly short draw length anyway I only shoot about 22 inches on a bow like this so this bow is actually pretty stout you may find that your bow is obviously longer and may not be as heavy at this short of a draw length but that's all kind of a different story for a different day all that stuff again is included in my bow making book so hopefully in understanding trying to do this so you can see a little bit hopefully it'll start allowing you to understand the tiller of a bow and then remove the material and once we find these places in which the material needs to be removed I always tend to put my thumb on it or my fingers whenever I'm done looking at it so I don't forget where it is or look at different features of the woods like little pin nut clusters or something and I know it's right between these two little pin nut Chevron's nothing severe we're just going to take our little scraper again and we're not trying to hog a ridiculous amount of wood out but we're just going to take a few good scrapes out of here and at this point it's very minut work if you sit here and work on this for 15 minutes you will inevitably remove too much material and if you remove too much material the rest of the bow has to be scraped down to meet this one weak point so we're just going to scrape a little bit I would say right not too much more a little bit then we're gonna be ready to check it again right there that's pretty good number now step back and we'll check it again all right another little point that I needed to make sure that I point it out is when you have the string on the bow and it's probably very very difficult for you guys to see at home and you'll know what I mean whenever you do it there's a very good chance that when you string it up that the string is going to favor one side of the bow and that means when you look down the end of the knocks the string actually favors one side and leans off a lot of times the limbs naturally curve one way or another and I've seen where many people spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to correct that where the string will track perfectly right down the center of the limb but the problem is is that's actually a good thing you want it to favor one side of the bow because that makes it easier to shoot different arrow spines off of this bow if you don't anything about arrow spines well then that's gonna have to be add another video for another day but anyway when you have the string that naturally favors one side and it favors this side of the bow I think you can actually see it here that it makes the arrow let's show it here like this it doesn't make the arrow stick out as far as opposed to if we put it on this side you see how far the arrow sticks out if we try to hold the bow up and down straight up and down and you see how far the arrow actually points off to the one side compared to when we do it and it's actually a little straighter up and down this way that means the string favors aside and by putting the arrow on the side that the string favors its going to allow it to be more forgiving per the arrow that it likes to shoot meaning it's not going to be nearly as finicky and you can get away with shooting a lot different arrows off of it it's very important so that's what's gonna dick your top limb purse your bottom limb all right now once you're actually happy with how the tailor looks when you're pulling it back and it helped ibly not perfect yet at this point but i'm pretty happy with it at my draw length i'll still adjust it a little bit we're actually going to give it a couple days to naturalize and normalize to the to the environment so we're going to give it a couple days before we remove any more material we can shoot it a little bit and then we'll go back and we'll really perfect the tiller as we want but then we go ahead and check the tiller and draw it back to your draw length which like I said I don't usually hold upright and then draw back to here like modern archers do more of a shoot in front and camp DuBose and my draw links very short so for me to hold it like this and pull it back is very unnatural to me but you can see how the limbs are bending which really is not too awful bad so once you're happy with them then the long once you have an arrow you're ready to shoot all right so now's a good time if you need to tighten up your string what we'll do is one string watch you take it off the top and we can twist it obviously that when you twist it tighter and you'll know because when you let go it unravels twist it tighter let's start with four or five turns at a time and then bend it and put it back on and that will raise your brace height so in case you need to have a little bit more distance in between here that's how you're going to tighten it but you can't go crazy with it but you can gain about a half an inch or so now keep this in mind too if you unstring your bow and it carries some natural arc to it like the limbs aren't super straight then that is something that we call set and that is very normal especially with a hickory bow this stave is only all told two and a half weeks old which is insane that Aiko is able to take this bow that's I'm gonna guess 58 inches long I think maybe yeah probably about 58 I didn't even measure it 58 inches long and I'm drawing a 22 inch draw on it and it's fully tailored to 22 inch it's not perfect draw cuz we're not perfected this is all the amount of set that it took and that is the and that only reason is is because we forstride it over a fire so that's not the best way to do it in my opinion but there is something we can do in the future to help speed that process up not speed it up it helped even counteract a little bit of the set but you have to remember when you're looking at a bow like this if it's got this much bend in it when you're said and done that's not bad especially for a Hickory bow this was a straight limb that was about as straight as could be and even after tillering I only have maybe an inch of set or string follow that's it hardly any at all now if your bow when you take the string off it just stays bent it still had way too much moisture in it and unfortunately the damage is done you will be able to correct maybe a little bit of that by bending it back straight and then drawing a little bit more moisture out of it over in fire but all in all it's the the belly fibers are already stressed and compressed and they'll probably never fully rebound back from that but on this one we did pretty good job drying it out and for a Hickory bow in Florida that's I literally cut this tree two and a half weeks ago and then dried it for two days over a fire that is pretty darn good for set and string follow in fact that's really good and if I had to take a guess I'll weigh all this stuff later I think it feels about 55 pounds at 22 inches where I draw the bow too and of course make sure to keep following along with some of these stone-age how to's that we do because I have a video I'm not exactly sure what's gonna be called but it's kind of the context of primitive archery that's going to be coming up in the future and if it's already out I'll go ahead and drop a link if you're watching this shoot a year later or so but we're going to talk about the importance of how all of this intertwines in real primitive archery how primitive peoples actually did it's a pretty interesting thing but let's continue on with the build because we're not quite done yet so anyway here we are and if you needed to see building arrows for this I'll drop a link down in that description I've got I've got how to build the arrows I've got how to build the stone points anything you can need this is a whole stone age build series and everything that I have in these series as I clump them all together I'll make a playlist even on YouTube but I'll put links down in the description and hopefully you'll be able to find these other videos on my hunt primitive youtube channel because we have so many videos showing you everything a dizzy from the sinew string or a rawhide string to building the bow to making the arrowheads to making the arrows to going and hunting with and we have all kinds of stuff going on so make sure you check all that stuff out and subscribe if you're not doing that already but let's continue on with this build because I'll tell you what we're almost done in fact right now you're probably wondering a little bit about the little pigtail hanging off the end and I'm just gonna let you know what we're do is once we've got this boat completely done I'm not going to cut it off yet I'm actually gonna wrap this around a couple times so you don't want to cut it off yet because I already know somebody's thinking me and I'm just gonna go cut that off because now my string is the length that I want to leave it long cuz your string may may work back and forth a little bit leave this pigtail on until we're completely this will be like one of the last things you do and I will wrap it around and I'll tie it on that way we always have a little extra if we need it because we may build another bow if something ever happens to this one and you might be able to reuse the string so that's just a little tip for you in the future and then also when we tie this on it'll help keep the string from ever falling off the bottom nock and undoing some of your twists that you preloaded into it just to increase your brace height and decrease your string link so anyway let's continue on because I'm getting really excited and really I just want to go shoot because this bow is turning out so so good so far so now what we're looking at this has been about a week and I've been shooting the bow and I really enjoyed the tailorable after not only a little while of shooting the bow in and testing it but also some normalizing with the humidity and the climate you're gonna have some spots that maybe reabsorb some moisture some other spots that are losing moisture so your tiller is kind of bound to change just a little bit and so that's why it's important that after a few days or a week even after two weeks you go back and you look at the tiller again you make sure you're looking at it at the brace and see if anything's getting out of tiller a little bit because that can be harmful to your bow down the road and then adjust that retailer the bow and get it as perfect as you want to be and that's why I didn't put a finish on the bow yet so after we've shot it for a little while and we're seeing some places that maybe the tiller needs adjusting like now I'm getting to a point where it looks like it's bending a little bit more here than it is up here see what I'm talking about just a little bit not exactly sure how that looks on camera to you but at least whenever I sit back and watch it I can see I have more bend here and we're gonna run into where this limb is going to be overstressed over a period of time it'll start taking more set potentially have a catastrophic failure probably not but it may so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back and the same thing I did before you can see that there's a bit of a flat section right here especially and then a little bit right here and so I'm just going to continue to scrape and retailer this bow until I have a nice perfect arc on both sides that's very consistent throughout the draw so that's what we're gonna do is revisit we're just gonna scrape it down and then get it perfect but I brought along another bow and I wanted to introduce you to this one this is a bow that I made with stone tools about I would say six maybe seven years ago and it's made out of a piece of hickory and to send you a string oh by the way I didn't show you a building the sinew string because I have another video on that and I will link that in the Stone Age series and down in the description and I would like to say it's an oldie but a goodie but it's not really a goodie but at least it shows you how to build a sinew or a rawhide bowstring for that matter so anyway with this bow that's the string actually built for this bow is the one you're gonna see in that video same exact string it's lasted me all these years it's such a such a robust string material even though it's it's primitive but anyway in building this and I've hunted and I've taken game with this bow I work this with stone tools and the piece of wood had a little bit of moisture in it still and it took on a little bit of satin so I went through and I did a heat tempering a really good heat tempering on the belly you can see how it's kind of toasted in here and that brought a little bit of life back in the bow now oddly enough our new bow that we made actually shoots harder than this one that was heat tempered and one thing I wanted to make mention of with heat tempering I'm not saying I won't heat temper that other bow it all but several years ago I was still heavy in the practice of heat tempering bellies on bows and what I've learned throughout the years is when you heat temper you're gonna gain what I call ghost poundage or ghost performance and that is because we're hyper drying the piece of wood we're drying it out over a heat source and so we lose a lot of moisture and the bow becomes very heavy it starts being very snappy it starts seeing like it is a really well performing though but now over a certain period of time being months potentially even years depending if you put a finish on the bow or not it's going to absorb some of that moisture back in even if you put a sealer on the bow it'll just absorb it slower and so then what happens is once that bow has finally soaked up that moisture you're almost right back to where you were before you heat tempered so being that because I've hunted with this Bell it a lot full on string it you can see that it does have some sets and strings follow and that's not a bed it's not like a deal breaker I mean this is you can see that it's got that that's pretty normal say for a white wood or a Hickory bow especially in the east or south east is to have some of that even with the heat tempering that we did on it it's it's tempered clear up the sides and everything I really baked it out pretty good we just lost a little bit out over the years so now with this bow and I'm not saying it's a bad bow cuz it's absolutely not it's a great bow but with this one I have no intention of heat tempering the belly unless I'm in a situation where I am trying to gain a little bit more poundage or from trying to drive the bow out a little bit more before before sealing it but at this point in time this bow even as is shoots harder but then this boat is and this one is they're pretty much about the same weight overall but I'm getting a little bit more power out of this one even though this one's heap tempered so it's not necessarily a fix-all for everything to go ahead and tip heat temperate but you can gain a little bit of weight and performance out of it but what I'm trying to say is every things you gain initially from heat tempering the belly on one of these bows you're not going to be able to keep all that you're not going to retain it so the moral of the story is if you take a bow like this that shoots really well without heat tempering don't feel obligated to do it if it shoots really good it's a hard-hitting bow you stand more of a chance of actually messing it up by heat tempering it and end up running into a Taylor problem now I have to retailer it we lose more weight next thing you know now you had a great bow you went in heat tempered the whole dang thing and it turns into after you've adjusted it in heat tempered it now you're actually slower than you were before so be careful doing that kind of stuff but it is a good way to add a little bit more performance if your boat needs performance as of now this one doesn't but hang with me because after we retailer it and we shoot it a little while longer you never know I might add it I might not I'll let you know probably in about another week or two so anyway I'm gonna go ahead and retailer this bow if all of that makes sense once I get to tell her where I really like it I'm gonna keep shooting it and when the tiller finally starts to be stable and you don't see any more changes in the tiller at all not in the brace not in the tiller and a week has gone by and there's been no changes but then you're ready to finally finish your bow all right now once we've gotten down to a point that we're actually really happy with the tiller of our bow and we don't want to make any more adjustments everything seems stable now's the time which you can find a little flake like this one it's kind of got that 90 degree a little break edge on it and if you have any place that you need to clean up we're not removing massive amounts of material here but what we'll do is we'll just gently scrape any sort of tooling marks out that you have that you want to get rid of we're not trying to make any major Corrections at this point we're just cleaning it up this is finish work and so we'll go over the entire bow with just a little tiny flake cleanup any like your square edges we can go ahead and round those off a little bit make those look nice and by the time we're done with this we'll be just ready to pick up something like a deer antler or a bone and we're going to do what we call burnishing and that's where we just take the round edge and we're gonna rub it vigorously over every bit of surface area on this bow that we possibly can and what that's going to do is that's going to like compress the fibers and help with a little bit of moisture resistance as well as make the belly and the back fiber so we're gonna do the entire bow a little bit stronger and that'll also keep the grain from rising a little bit if it does get wet but we can't add a finish after this if we would like now that other bow that I introduced you to that actually has no finish on it whatsoever that is bare wood I have never put any sort of finish on that other bow and it's done just fine it's done very well and even to this day I have no problem taking it out and hunting and killing animals with it however when you rub your hand across that you can tell because it has gotten wet a few times that the grain is raised and it's got a rather rough feel now it's not the end of the world you can leave the bow perfectly as is if you would like if you want to maintain a smoother feel then we can apply a finish and the finish can also aid in slowing down the absorption of humidity in the air but what it can also do is also slow down the expelling of that moisture as well so if you expose it for long periods of time into a very humid climate it will then take longer for it to dry out so it's just going to slow down the fluctuation of the humidity or the moisture content of the wood so keep that in mind but if we're talking about again primitive people's who are going to be storing their bow in say the raptors of their shelter their Hutton or whatever it is they live in it's going to maintain a level of lower moisture than it would say the average person that's just going to take this in their house and lean it up against the wall so if you do I'm assuming pretty much everybody when they're done with this live in a hut especially if you're watching this video so you're gonna want to try to actually keep it in a fairly dry location so not really your basements you know put it in your your living areas that's gonna be your best option and then if you do have a room that happens to have a dehumidifier that's not a bad choice either so now I will literally sit and burnish this bow front back sides every piece of it for a couple hours and I'll just work over the whole piece of wood and you can kind of know when you have a rocks pot still because you can feel the antler kind of grabbing you want to get it to where when you run it across that it feels like you're running across a smooth surface and it's not grabbing ahold of the tool it's interesting as you try it out you'll understand but I'll do this for a couple hours mostly when I'm visiting with friends or from sitting around the fire enjoying a nice conversation because this can be taxing work but at the same time if your mind is occupied with something else much like I am right now when I'm talking to you I don't mind sitting and just furnishing a bow over and over and over and then that's something too that you can hand your kids and say here you play with this a little bit and this is how we're gonna you know varnish this wood or your friends and you pass it around and everybody can kind of get a handle of it but oh yeah so once you've got that kind of handled out said burnish it up for a couple hours and get it you'll get a really nice smooth finish you'll you'll understand after you've done it for a while it won't feel super smooth and then by the time that you are truly done burnishing this piece of wood it'll be quite smooth so I've actually done some of the bow already I haven't done all of it but some of it is and it's quite smooth and it's quite nice and it almost looks like it was really work down with sandpaper even though it wasn't so make sure to burnish it if you want a nice finish at the end and if you want to apply a finish we're gonna move on to that in the in the future I'm gonna shoot it just a little bit more and make sure I don't want to heat treat the belly but as of right now it's doing so good I hate to do it to even risk it but sometimes you don't have to be in a rush you don't have to make that decision right away shoot the bow enjoy it and if it starts losing perform if it starts getting a lot of set and you want to do that later on there's nothing wrong with it but as of right now I'm really enjoying it so I'm gonna go shoot it alright originally wasn't going to put a leather grip on this bow but I think you'd you probably want to see me do it and want to see the process that I would use and then also it does serve two nice functions one being it does keep the grip a little less slippery if it gets wet especially with the finish that we're gonna put on the bow in a little while and then also we extend the leather out just far enough so when we hold it the leather extends up above our hand and then that also acts as a strike plate for the arrow because if you've ever shot an arrow off of a Burwood bow when you pull it back you hear Shh you hear the sound of the arrow coming across the wood bow and if you have that little piece of leather sticking up out of the top that muffles that sound that could be the difference in a really quiet evening of deer hunting and having a deer standing there and all of a sudden it hears it and it puts it on alert and it'll take off and run so that certainly happened before so what I've got and this is this is brain tan leather just a little extra strips from some of the other projects I always try to save a little bit of everything and then I've got some pine pitch on a stick a fire in the bow and there's no finish on the bow if you if you put a finish on here like some sort of oil finish or anything like we're gonna do later then it's not gonna stick very good but what I'm gonna do I should have been doing this already is I'm gonna set this by the fire but I don't want it over it where it's gonna get all city and black and that kind of stuff like to keep it relatively clean and all we're gonna do is just warm this wood so let me go ahead and let this warm for about five minutes or so and we don't want it really super hot but we want it where you touch it and it feels pretty darn warm and then we'll move on to the next steps give me a minute we'll get back all right that's getting almost warm enough know what you do want to do is you want to pre fit your piece of leather of course because you want to make sure that it does wrap around properly and fit so this way once it's already pre fit then you just remember which side you started with and which side you want up and then that's what you're going to stick with and that's what I'm gonna do and once you kind of wrap it and test it you'll understand how it wraps and everything it's not terribly difficult there's not much to it now what I'm going to do and the reason we're warming the wood it's pretty warm now is we're also going to warm this pitch up and then we're going to go and just make a big giant mess but we want to put pitch on this because if you don't glue the grip down it will spin on you like it won't be on there very tight it'll constantly if you want to come undone it'll just be an absolute mess and so we want to put some pitch glue on here and you can use hide glue if you want but like I've said many times before I'm very much pitch blue kind of person and it doesn't require pottery for me to use all the time I can just save it on these sticks and it's really quick quickly heat activated so I'll go ahead and just coat that on pretty darn good right about where we want it we can always pick up some of the leather if we have to and slide it up under but for the most part I think we're got it right about where we want almost done and that's pretty good now you want to heat this up again and that pitch will start to lay a little flat so you'll notice when you put it on it's a little bit messy it's gonna lay a little bit flat go ahead and just heat that right up or it's a little bit messy a little bit bumpy but as you heat it down it'll lay flat you'll understand what I'm talking about when you do it then while it's still relatively warm you don't need it screaming hot make sure you've got your correct side that you want to use on your leather I do so I'm gonna keep all right use this side and I already kind of know where I'm laying it down and wanting to use it so I you kind of got to go a little bit quick because remember it's heat activated and I like to lay the pieces of leather next to one another and you're probably going to get a little bit a pitch that squeezes out I could try not to I did get a tiny bit there which stinks but it's not really the end of the world it's just aesthetics yeah wrap this thing around you have got a little bit squeezed out there best thing you can do is if it squeeze this out don't try to smear it off while it's wet because you'll smear it right into the leather so go ahead and wait till it dries and then we can kind of pick it off a little bit and if you do make a mistake you can gently heat around the leather and pull it back off that's that's very doable so once you really have gotten it where you want it which I do I like the way it looks right there I think it's pretty nice and give it a couple you can still feel that the the pitch is soft and that's one set this really sets in there it'll be locked in so now's a good time you can just work your little edges make it nice and I'll show you a picture of it when it's all said and done all right not a picture but I'll get the video up close to you and what I might do is actually trim take a stone flake and trim that just a tiny bit I might do that so that's how I usually do is just take a little stone flake and trim the last little bit let me make sure this is good before it sets see if you can pick off some of that other stuff just a little bit sticking up through that's not the world what you know it's done the real way and then you gotta remember too that stuff's waterproof so that's really good is if it does get wet or if you get the grip sweaty it won't detach it won't attach the grip from from the handle I think that's pretty good I like it where it's at all right the bows over here by the fire keeping the pitch kind of yeah it's still tacky so now what I'm going to do is now that I've lined out where I want it I'm gonna put a line with this sharp little flake it'll cut it pretty easily just cuts right through it that easy so then what we end up doing is we'll go back and we'll put just a little bit more pitch on that yep that ought to be really good in fact they got a little bit more here than I still need so I'm going to trim that alright so let me do that let me go ahead and heat this up again real fast I got her heating up here pretty good and I'm gonna put a little bit just precisely right where I wanted on the leather and that'll help make it stick again working kind of fast now what we're gonna do is get a little pointed stick here and I'm gonna shove this corner right up under here that makes sense to you almost here we go and now to really finish it off we're gonna put just another little dab of pitch right in there try not to make a mess of it gonna make a little bit of a mess that's the end of the world so we can pick a little bit of it off later there we go very nice and that'll hold pretty good and if it doesn't hold you can always just go back later and add a little bit more in fact I'm gonna squeeze just a little bit under there's a spot right there you can see so I'm gonna roll that back with my finger just a little bit of pitch in there try not to make a mess but I'm doing it anyway then like said that's what happens if you smear it while I'm still wet do as I say not as I do that right so it's it's a little cooler you can kind of pick it off it's not so bad now now what you need to do is anything you need to trim or whatever do that put this back right around the fire and just warm the whole thing up again and that will that will soften all that pitch and then it'll set right into that leather anywhere that it was maybe a little bit cool when you set it down and it didn't stick really good now of course as you hold this in eukaryote it'll soften that pitch ever so slightly so the longer you sit and hold this you know while you're walking around hunting it will soften up slightly but it'll be so tacky it will not spin on you because the whole thing won't be heated just the spots that you're holding but just that alone will really over time it'll keep squeezing that pitch up into that leather and in that wood and that'll be a very secure fit for years and years to come and then of course the color of the handle will change as well as it absorbs the moisture or the oils from your hand so anyway I'm gonna go ahead and set this back over here by the coals and just heat that up and then that's it it is completely done short of taking a little flake and maybe just cleaning up a little bit this stuff for aesthetic reasons but other than that our handles on and it was just that easy alright so in my pinch pot here that's actually quite warm so I'm not gonna hold it very long that is equal parts and there's not a real scientific method I used to it I'll stick it down here in front of me it's equal parts beeswax bear grease and pine pitch and I use all those for various reasons I love that the beeswax is more of the heat activated and the pine pitch is definitely a great waterproofing and also dries a little bit harder and then as we heat it up and work if the bear grease can work down would a little bit and I don't want it to work down a ridiculous amount but I do want it some now you want it to a point where it's it's melted but it's not going to burn the crap out of you and we don't want to put a ridiculous amount on but we need to start putting it on like that okay and then once it starts getting solid on the bow go ahead and hold it back over your fire or your coals and that's going to remelt that area and you can kind of wipe off the excess we don't want it mound it up on here at all a little goes a long way and we're going to do this all the way around front and back the whole nine yards so basically you're gonna wipe it on and wipe it off wax on wax off quite literally and then once don't be afraid to just go ahead and coach your hand in it too and you're literally going to work it just like that and you're gonna feel where it's at in the wood it see it didn't take but a finger and that's enough to do probably over half of a limb so I've got probably two-thirds of that limb already are covered and it might be enough to do the whole limb it does not take much we do not want to cover this thing and wax and finish and we can get the tip we can get everything but what you'll then do is once it's kind of on there get a little bit more up in this area I'll just do one limb at a time let me go ahead and work through this first get it all on so yes you can absolutely get too much so I mean when I'm dipping my finger and I'm getting a teeny bit on my finger like that and putting it on and then I'm gonna reheat that to set it in don't be afraid like as soon as it starts getting really glossy and runny that's that's kind of what you want and you don't have to have a finish on the bow now that other bow that I showed you earlier there's no finish on that but this one we kind of want to do a really nice job keep the grain from raising and okay that's good and so this finish is gonna help with that a little bit now you don't really want to get it on your leather but if it's you get a little bit on the edges that's not gonna hurt a single thing but the idea is this is gonna kind of slow down some of the absorption of moisture if it's super humid out and then as we store this in a dry place it'll lose any moisture it has anyway but you're gonna work every little bit of this bow on this limb and I'll do the other limb later but I'll work this one so you can see you're gonna massage this in everywhere and if it gets too hard to work heat it right back up so and then you can rub it pretty hard so like I have a kind of a thick yucky spot here you can see rub that hard till it softens up and then you can wring that right off your finger and then flick it right back in your pot and go back into the stuff for next time and this stuff will when it's finally really cooled down it should have a slight a slight waxy feel if it feels super waxy then it's on there or you can really see it and it's hazed up it's on there pretty thick you don't need all that you can really squeegee it right off and that's another thing about the pine pitch because it dries harder than wax by itself is it should not be sticky when it's dry right now it's still it's still slippery and sticky and it's uncomfortable and you don't want your bow to be like that because then everything's gonna stick to it hairs gonna stick to it dirt and dust and everything is gonna stick to it so if you have a sticky bow finish you're gonna find it really annoying until it collects enough junk that it stops being sticky but when you activate it like this you're using friction that will get it right down in all that wood fiber it'll fill all those gaps it'll melt itself down in and you can probably spend like this this limb is already coated and then what you can do is once it's dry I try not to hold the grip while my hands are like this once it's dry and cool and it's no longer sticky come back now if you do did do it and it is still very sticky then what you're gonna want to do is you come back you know twenty thirty minutes later and it's still tacky and sticky then that means your mixture was pretty off and I would I'd be adding something else in there to stiffen it more beeswax potentially pine pitch whatever you think you need more of to take some of the grease and the sticky out of it but once it stops being cool if it feels like it's got too much on it you can take a flint flake and you can basically scratch the surface you will never take all that wax and stuff out of this wood at this point it's on there so if you ever had ideas you wanted to put snake skins on the back you better do it before you ever do this because paint or snake skins you will never get anything to stick to this even if you scrape it with a flint flake because it gets down in that wood so like I said if it does go on a little bit thick and it's a little too filmy for you go ahead and take a flake and when you do it you'll see it peel right up and there's nothing wrong with that you almost kind of want to do that to thin it out and then go ahead and use the friction again to set it back in so it doesn't really change the look at the bow it looks great and as soon as it's as soon as this side is is our bow is completely finished we'll head on over we'll do some video of shooting it and I'll give you some performance specs on it don't expect this thing to be a speed demon I'll tell you that it is a very bare-bones primitive bow but I tell you what it's good-looking bow especially building with all Stone Age technology so all right I'll go ahead and finish the other side and then we'll just go shoot this thing well our bows all finished up really happy with the tiller love the way it shoots everything about it's very very nice we're gonna shoot through the coronagraph which obviously isn't terribly primitive but it's really important for collecting data so we're running sinew bowstring on it everything is completely primitive the only thing that's not permit obvious is chronograph so let's shoot this through the chronograph and we can see at least the kind of the numbers that we're putting out now keep in mind that I'm only drawing this bow about 22 inches if we're if we're talking about making a bow that draws much further 26 28 30 inches even in some cases we have a much longer power stroke and per pound on the bow and our power stroke we're going to be putting up higher numbers so I'm kind of that anomaly in a way that we're on the lower end of scale four feet per second compared to what you could potentially be shooting but I already kind of know with most shoots cuz of Argos shot it quite a bit when we really want to talk about the primitive context or the the real context of primitive people hunting with these bows it is that there's no set drawing standard some people shot with a longer draw some people shot with a short draw very much like I do just like today we have a lot of people I have a lot of friends that shoot anywhere from an 18 to a 24 inch draw which most traditional archers thinks is extremely extremely short and it's actually a lot more common than you think it is in fact a lot of people that shoot say at 28 where they think they shoot a 28 inch drop when they measure their draw length in the way that I actually instruct them to they're really surprised that a lot of them shoot only 23 24 inches it's kind of neat to think about that but we will do a test in the future on shooting a longer draw and how that affects the ft/s but the speeds that were shooting with this with this arrow which is about 460 grains I think it was right around there 460 ish maybe 470 that's the numbers we're going to be putting up and this bow is I think a great ad I think almost 55 and 22 inches where I'm shooting them so anyway let's put it through the chronograph and you can at least see the numbers so shoot all right so when you're talking about shooting those kind of feet per second with 55 pembo 460 grain arrow and you're talking a hickory bow that was made with Stone Age tools and dried out over a fire and it went from green live tree to finished bow in about two and a half weeks with a sinew bowstring and you're shooting in the 150s with it that is enough to realistically kill anything in North America especially it might be a little on the light side for maybe moose or bison Teeter and maybe on elk but stuff like deer and black bear you have no problem at all killing with a boat just like this we're shooting through pigs and deer no problem with bows just like this did actually shoot even a little bit slower than this one so stone-age bow belt sinew string which typically does perform at a slower feet per second than your more modern strings and it's hickory miss but this stayed at least even at this point in time where it's been a while but the whole bow is tailored in under two and a half weeks right now this piece of wood from the live tree to finish bow it's been probably probably more like three and a half weeks from complete start to finish and a lot of that was just sitting around because I was busy do another kind of work so we've got some pretty good performance and I'm only drawing dang thing about 22 inches so we got ourselves a real winner here

Channel: undefined

Views: 379,204

Rating: 4.8312368 out of 5

Keywords: how to build a bow, stone age bow build tutorial, stone age wood working, primitive bow making, bow making, make a hunting bow

Id: 8FlpUJW5C-o

Length: 130min 13sec (7813 seconds)

Published: Sat May 09 2020