How to Make A Survival Bow | 1 Hour Build

[Music] welcome back today i'll be showing you how to make a fully functioning survival style bow from green undried wood and in less than an hour part one wood selection greenwood is much more flexible than wood that's been properly dried on the one hand that makes your bow much harder to break which is great for a hastily made bow but the downside is that the wood can't store as much energy so if you want to make a fast shooting bow then you'll want to properly dry the wood there are many great boards out there but you should try whatever you have growing around you wood selection for survival style bows is much more forgiving than for bows made from properly dried wood since the green on dried wood is so much more flexible and difficult to break i ended up choosing a maple sapling about one or one and a quarter inches thick you really want to avoid anything too thick because you'll just have to work a lot harder carving away that extra thickness part two cutting and debarking usually in the spring and summer the sap will be flowing and the bark will be really easy to take off in this case it was a little bit stubborn and it wouldn't just peel so i had to remove the outer bark with a knife which let the inner bark scrape away easily with the back of my knife when you take off the bark be really careful not to damage that first layer of wood under the bark because if you do that might compromise the tension integrity of your bow you need that back to be a clean strip of fibers that's not damaged and that's going to give your bow the most strength and tension part 3 roughing out the side profile or the thickness taper in order to get the bend nice and smooth we have to taper the limbs so that they're thinner at the tips and thicker at the inner limbs i'm going to start out by thinning the tips to about a half an inch thick and then later on i'll blend that taper into the limbs as i test the bend of the bow against the ground later on we'll refine that taper as we close in on the right tiller shape part four roughing out the front profile or the width taper now that the side profile is roughed out we can cleanly visualize how we want our front profile to go to start off i'm just gonna taper the outer six to eight inches as they narrow into the tip later on we can adjust the front profile a little bit more with our knife try not to remove too much width from your bow especially from the mid and the inner limb area we want to keep as much width as we can so that the bow can store more energy part five floor tillering the main goal in tillering is to evenly distribute the bending stress so that no one part of the bow is any more overworked when you floor tiller you want to push the center of the bow with one of the tips against the ground and the other tip held in your hand try to only push with about the target draw weight of your bow if you have a target draw weight in mind don't push any harder than that or you'll just unnecessarily stress out the wood the mantra here is that you only want to remove wood from the stiff areas identify any areas that are bending or are bending more than the rest and leave those areas alone just remove wood from the stiff areas part 6 the string i'm going to be using paracord for this bow but you can also use your boot lace or whatever other kind of string you have just to be clear most of these are not good bowstring materials a proper bow string will stretch much less and waste much less energy but paracord will shoot an arrow if it's all you have since the paracord will stretch you want one end of your bow string to be adjustable so that you can shorten the string appropriately for the top loop i'm just going to tie a really simple overhand knot leaving a loop about one or one and a half inches long if you've already cut some knocks for your tips test your loop to make sure that it fits well but i'll be covering that step in the next part for the other end of your string i'm going to be showing you how to tie an adjustable timber hitch for now we want the string to be over long so cut it to about the length of your bow plus 10 inches or so part 7 knocks now that we have a string we have to cut some knock so that our bow can accept the string keep in mind that the string is going to move as you draw the bow so make sure that there's nowhere on your knocks that the string could snag part eight long string tillering now that we have a string and some knocks we can get to tillering the bow with our long string to start off adjust the string so that it's about the length of your bow you don't want it so loose that there's slack and you don't want it so tight that you have to brace the bow to get it on once again we're just going to be testing the bow while removing the stiff spots and leaving the bending areas alone but this time we're going to check the bend by pulling on the long string if you're not comfortable drawing the bow in front of your face you can step on the bow and pull upward with the string which is a little bit safer now of course the best way to do this would be with a tiller tree but i'm trying not to use my shop or any of my advanced tools for this build part 9 short string tillering once the bow starts bending a little bit further then we can brace the thing i like to do this around half the draw length or a little bit further but some bowyers do it sooner it's a little bit of a personal preference when you actually switch to bracing the bow all you have to do is adjust your timber hitch so that you have to brace the bow to get it on you'll need to fiddle a bit to get the right brace height when shooting i like about a six inch brace height but for this construction part of the face three or four inches is fine and will stress the bow out a little bit less keep checking how the bow bends and keep following that mantra by removing wood from the stiff areas and leaving the bending areas alone [Music] you can see that i've hit full draw but i have a few tiller issues the top limb is bending too much from one spot and is bending a little bit more than the bottom limb overall so i'm going to work the bottom limb overall to try to get it to bend more and then i'm going to work the top limb everywhere about that spot where it's bending too much [Music] after a few adjustments the tiller is looking a little bit better it's really far from perfect i would call this a pretty bad tiller for a bow made from green on dried wood that's pretty fine since the wood's so flexible but if i were making a bow from properly dried wood which is a little bit more brittle i'd really want to take the time to get a nice tiller shape with a nice smooth bend and no hinges [Music] part 10 shooting and retailering the problem with making bows from greenwood is that the characteristics of the wood will change as the wood dries when your bow dries out the draw weight will increase which will make it store more energy now that might make it shoot faster for a little while but eventually the bow could overwhelm itself so you'll have to retailer the bow as it dries to make sure the bend is nice and smooth and the tiller is safe now the other option is just to treat these green wood survival bows as somewhat disposable if you want a bow that lasts a long time you may as well go through the proper drying process and make sure you never bend the bow while it's wet which will permanently damage it unfortunately properly drying bowed can take months to years but if you'd like to get started sooner check out my quick drying tutorial or my boardvo tutorial that you can follow with lumber from the big box store alright everyone i hope you have some fun making survival bows and arrows and if you'd like to see how i made these arrows let me know down in the comments and i'll put out a guide that's all for today i'll see you next time and until then may your arrows fly true [Music] you

Channel: Dan Santana Bows

Views: 1,019,376

Keywords: How to make a bow, make a bow, bow and arrow, survival bow, bushcraft, survival skills

Id: 8Gz4Ezxl9E0

Length: 9min 25sec (565 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 03 2022