How to make a Yucca Bow String

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 are new here do please consider subscribing because we're really working hard to get you where you want to be in your own primitive build and hunting adventures but today what we're talking about is the yucca bowstring okay so i just went out and cut a whole bundle of yucca leaves all right always cut more than you think you need because you can always save it and use it for other projects later to me it doesn't really go bad when it dries out you know you don't even have to scrape it at that point you just peel it apart but when it comes to making a bow stitch string in particular i want to use green yucca now i don't have a lot of experience with using dry yucca or even reddit yucca for a bow string but the theory behind me using green yucca is when you go cut this stuff it's pretty much as strong as and as flexible as it's going to be okay so because this stuff is already really thin i mean we can grab this stuff and already pull it apart there's not a lot of like meat on this type of yucca that we have here in florida there's some western yuccas or that probably have a lot more meat to them and those you may have to go through a different process and may benefit through redding see like i don't ret and by rhett i mean you take this stuff and you soak it in water and it starts like the decomposition of it where the meat of the plant will come off easier it'll come off really easy on this because there's not really too much to it so if i take it and i read this stuff it's going to start breaking down those fibers a little bit which i don't want for a bowstring bow strings under a tremendous amount of tension and so we need this stuff to be as strong as we can get it but then also if i dry it then as you take anything and it's dry and you twist it it'll start fracturing that fiber ever so slightly and that's perfectly fine if we're talking about just using generic cordage i used you know dry yucca for all kinds of you know just generic cordage net fiber you know uh even used a lot of it in the gator hunt video if you've seen that one but i really want to use the green stuff for a bowstring and we're just going to clean it up and get it ready to use okay now before we get to actually cleaning some of this stuff this is a piece of deer sinew and we're going to use the yucca pretty much the same exact way that we use deer sinew to make bow string but i wanted to show this to you this is the backstrap sinew from a deer so you can already see they kind of look fairly similar well this stuff will peel apart into these long strands and then this piece of yucca i've already scraped which i'll show you the scraping in a second but see it will also pull apart into these long strands so it's kind of interesting that the yucca is sort of in a way the plant version of backstrap sinew one of the reasons i love to use it so much is because it just peels apart so easy to get these nice long beautiful strands and there's not very much waste in the plant itself okay so when it comes to cleaning this stuff you can go ultra primitive like you've seen me do in the other cordage videos or yucca gator cord videos and use a rock outside and scrape it's not a big deal let's just do it fast it's super hot outside i want to show you how to make a bow string you know we've already covered cordage so what we're going to use is a spoon you're going to really like using the spoon on this stuff because it just rakes all of this kind of meaty stuff i don't even know exactly what you would call it somebody plant oriented i'm sure we'll comment on that but i do both sides and i want to scrape it fairly clean i mean it doesn't have to be absolutely perfect clean and you'll notice that it's like there's some some wider sections that get hit a little harder and the rest of its overall more light green i don't want to beat this stuff to death because i don't want to damage the fibers but i want to get rid of just some of the plant material mass because this bow string is already going to be thick enough as it is especially when we twist it that we don't want all of this stuff shrinking out uh during kind of the stretching and drying period so you go go ahead and scrape you can scrape every one that you have or you can scrape a few and then twist a few and scrape a few and twist a few i typically scrape all about 20 or 30 and and just work from there if i need more i come out and get them these now i've also heard of people talk about uh like pounding to break it up and that might be something again that you do for the the more western types if they're really hard and really thick and meaty stuff like this i do not want to pound any of it i'm not going to accomplish anything by just beating the crap at it like there's people that process backs in you and they'll take a rock and they just bang the crap out of it and they make it all fluffy but what they do is they damage the fiber which weakens it and we don't want to damage these fibers we need them to be as strong as they're pretty much ever going to be okay so i assume if you're watching this you already know how to make cordage or just a normal two-ply reverse wrap cordage if you don't know how to do that i'll drop a link down in the description to just like a generic yucca cordage video that i did and that'll teach you the basics so we're not going to talk about the basics so much but we've got several of these peeled out and what i'm going to do at this point is i'm just going to separate them i don't want teeny tiny like whisper thin strands because those are really kind of a pain in the butt what i'm looking for are ones that are about an eighth of an inch to a sixteenth of an inch thick if you get them too thin then you will notice it's like you're just gonna have three million little fibers because we're gonna you need quite a few of these things um you know go ahead and try to knock them down to about an eighth of an inch or a 16 inch wide okay so one of the things that i really like to do is i like to pull a few from one direction then i turn the piece over and then pull from the other side because what you'll notice is there is a side that's a little bit thicker and then the side that's towards the end of the leaf gets a little bit thinner and so what i kind of want to avoid ideally is having all the thick ends on one side and all the thin ends on the other because as i as we build the cord as you'll see as we move forward when i lay a new bundle in i don't want it all thicker here and all thinner here so that's why i kind of alternate i'll take a few and then flip it over and take a few okay so i've got a nice a decent little heap we're going to need a lot more than this but nice little heap of processed out fibers so now what we're going to do is start grabbing a couple handfuls here and what i like to do is i like to give it like a little twist and then gauge the thickness of it and then i know just from experience on making bow strings how thick i want it but i do know that this stuff needs to be obnoxiously thick when it's green like this because it will shrink and stretch especially as we dry it so whenever i twist this i'm really looking what i can do later is as i get more of the cord done i'll actually like measure it and tell you the exact measurement that i'm kind of looking at but i'm going to take one bundle that's about as thick as i want my finished bow string to be and i'm going to set that bundle aside and i'm going to grab another bundle that's that thick again so two of those okay so now that we've got our two bundles ones to the side of me you can't see i want to just kind of drag these and elongate the bundle and by doing that instead of them all coming to an abrupt stop it once you see how they just kind of feather out so some of them stop here and some of them go all the way to here we want to make sure that we do that with both of these bundles because if they come to an abrupt stop like this right here we're going to have really really really really really thick and then all of a sudden trying to patch it in and it's all going to happen right here and it's going to end up breaking at that spot so what we want to do is drag these out and you see what i'm talking about with the thin ends and the thick ends if you can see that there it's really apparent like here's the tapered out tip ends and then here's the really like thicker bottom like base ends of the plant and so if they were all facing one way that would not make for a very consistent string and i do have something in here it's kind of an extra piece let's get rid of that okay we've got our two bundles feathered out we're going to go ahead and stack them together but but keep them separate i'm going to start mostly in the middle a little bit offset to one side it's not an exact science and we're going to give a good twist so here's the big difference okay it's really important part i want to convey to everybody is when we're making a bow string compared to just our normal yucca cord i want to make sure that we have a really tight firm twist in our cord okay so like i said i'm not going through the basics of how to do cordage i will drop a link down into the description if you need to know how to make this cordage in general so it's simple two-ply reverse wrap cordage okay but this is what's going to take so long with a bow string compared to cord that i'm just gonna twist out really really quick like the cord that i used in the gator video where i wasn't necessarily trying to hold a tremendous amount of weight like i wasn't trying to fight the gator on the cord i was trying to locate it and not lose it and it was still very strong but this stuff i need to be really really strong and so i am going to really reverse wrap this really tight and build up tension before i do my turnover twist and so i'm gonna have some really nice cord but it's thick it's it's quite thick and it's supposed to be so if you make it too thin then what's gonna happen is as it dries and as you stretch it it's going to shrink out and then as soon as you string the bow it's it's going to be much much thinner than you think it is you don't think plant fiber is going to shrink nearly as much as say sinew does but you'd be surprised it's got quite a bit of shrink to it so make it a lot thicker than you think you need to the first initial yucca bow string that i put together i didn't have a lot of faith in the material and i went really thick on it because i figured well i just want to see if i can make it work so i didn't originally intend for it to have a lot of shrink or stretch because i figured plant fiber wouldn't stretch or shrink nearly nearly like sinew does but turns out oh boy it did and then what it left me with was kind of a normal size just slightly over normal size bowstring and it actually made a very good bowstring and so that's where we're at today now do have one side that's a little bit longer than the other so i'm going to flop them over it doesn't matter but see what we did here is we just made a loop and the two i have one side that's a little bit longer one side's a little bit shorter and i put those on one side and the other side it's a little bit shorter on one side and longer on the other so i separated the two pieces out just like you would on any bow string and then i'm going to bundle those two together now some of those places where they are feathering out are already were already right there and that's and that's fine but you're going to notice it's going to be very thick on the first initial uh twist so i'll show you this here in a second as i get it but it's like i spend a lot of time really binding that up heavy that to me has really been the reason for success i believe in the yucca bow string is that really winding it and getting it tight and it takes me much longer to make a yucca bow string than it does to make a senubo string and certainly you know compared to a modern bow string where i can zip them out really really fast i'm getting this stuff really tight expect to get blisters on your fingers the first times you do this you want this stuff so tight that when you twist it and you grab the next one when you make this twist and you do it over it's pinching your finger really tight because this really tight cord wrap i do believe is crucial to having a really strong bow string so you're going to get a lot of little extra tail out pieces that stick up there's absolutely nothing wrong with that uh you can see it's much thicker here i mean it's it's really thick and then it starts to taper down as we get to these little feather out pieces well this is going to be about perfect now we're going to go just a tiny bit well right about here and this just comes from experience now if i continue this it's just going to get smaller and smaller and smaller so now i'll go ahead and grab this other bundle and i'm going to go ahead and lay in about three or four at a time and what i did i'll show you again what i did here in just a second and i'll twist those couple in and then i'm probably going to go ahead and grab another couple that's again why it's handy that they're all facing different ways and i'm laying it like straight across like fifty percent on this side and fifty percent on this side and then really winding it up so don't be afraid to really add quite a few fibers into this i mean i'm really putting probably four to five i'm not just adding one or two here or there i'm really adding quite a few especially as we get to new uh ends of these feathered out pieces and because they're you know they start getting mixed up you'll notice that your bundle starts having they start staggering themselves the more you handle them and work them around but as you twist this if you get to where you think you've gone too far and it's starting to run out or if you've got a like a bunch that's kind of stop right in one spot and you hit that spot and then you add fibers you really kind of make a weak spot so i'll go back and i'll look at the cord that i made and if it's starting to get thinner or if i have a spot that i wish this looks good to me but if i have a spot say well this doesn't look right i will untwist it and back it out and then fix it it's the the attitude of well i hope that'll be okay if you go into it with that attitude it's gonna break on you so if you really want to make a serious bowstring that's able to handle the tension from a real hunting primitive bow you have to be willing to go back and do the work and do it correctly if you rush through it or do loose cord or work past a spot that well i hope that holds if you have to ask yourself i hope that holds it's not gonna hold so like you're going to get good at this eventually i can feel the difference in my fingers that it's getting thinner okay so i'm going to go ahead and twist a few more because i want to show you hopefully you can see it on the camera okay it is very very slight but we're getting thinner in here right now i don't know if you can see the difference i can feel the difference i could i could quite literally be blind and twist this cord because i do a lot of it by feel in my fingers so i can feel that my bundles are getting smaller as i go with some loot i'm working some of those featherings out so there you go now you should absolutely be able to see this if we can get the camera to focus here so see how we're running this really consistent and then you see right here it starts getting thinner that's because i allowed that you can feel that difference if you allow your hands to feel for it so what i'm going to do is stop right here and i'm going to unwind back to that point you cannot be afraid to have to unwind your cord to fix it and make it better if it's worth doing it is worth doing right okay so as i'll wind it out just a little bit more really really tuck those fibers up in there and then i'll start again now if it's a little bit thicker in one spot that's kind of okay too so like where i added these in you have a little bit of a hump right here just a tiny bit not a whole lot but you'll notice that there's a couple high spots i would rather have an occasional high spot than an occasional low spot you're not going to break on an occasional high spot but you will break on an occasional low spot so when in doubt untwist it and add more fibers but again by the time you're done with this you should probably have a couple hours wrapped up in the whole bowstring it's not a quick process and expect to have some good finger blisters afterwards but i'll tell you what when it's all said and done and you put this on a bow and it works you are going to be really really proud of yourself and it's going to be really worth it in the end and i specifically don't really want to offer you know these primitive bowstrings on my website and i know people ask me for them all the time and i do build them for folks and you know i probably will inevitably just put them on my website but the unfortunate part is it takes so much time to really put together a good good bowstring and then to be able to warranty it and stand behind it i always recommend people do them for themselves if you really want to buy one we can sort that out um but for the most part they're going to be really expensive because of the amount of time and you know even the materials say oh you just got in the woods and you collect it but you talk about natural materials that you have to collect at scale um to meet everybody's needs man it gets hard collecting you know natural materials so anyway we're just going to go ahead and continue this on in fact i actually ran out of fibers already so i need to grab and pull more apart now but i'm just going to continue to work this down so it's it's quite thick let me get a tape measure and actually measure how thick our standard cord is because this is going to be about perfect by the time it's really stretched and dried out folks typically know me know i don't like tape measures in regards to primitive skills because it uh i like to encourage people to be intuitive and and just learn and figure it out all on their own but in this case of course i really want you to have a good experience with your first chord so as i lay this on here i would say it measures out to i'm going to say 5 16 thick so it's definitely wider than a quarter so i'm going to say 5 16 of an inch is how thick it really is from the outside to the outside of the bundle and that's quite thick i mean that's much thicker than a standard bow string most people would look this and say this there's no way that this thing is a bow string that's uh that's a ridiculous rope but anyway i'm going to split up more fibers i'm going to keep adding to it until i'm at length once i'm at length we'll pick it up from there and i'll show you the next step okay so we're finishing up always make more cord than you think you need because remember you got to tie knots on the end of this thing so you want to be really consistent throughout the cord but once you get really down to the very end like i'm at right now you can really just feather it right out because you're just going to take a little turn at the end and tie a little knot right there that'll keep it from untwisting on you tighten it up a little bit okay so i've got about all six foot actually a little bit more not yet a six foot a good cord and then i've got kind of the pigtail here that starts to taper out but this is useful for uh tying the knot so you can see it will come down now maybe about a foot or so you can see the thickness here and then i'll go down to the other end of it and you should be able to see i mean really consistent throughout the cord in regards to uh thickness and so that's really really important remember if it's if it's got a spot that's too thin catch it early because nothing's worse than getting you know a bow string that's this far along oh here i got a spot it doesn't look super good and i hope it holds now you should have caught that early on because you're not going to untwist this whole thing to do it i mean of course you're just not going to do you might as well just start a whole new one so anyway let's take it out and hang it and stretch it and show you that step okay so what i do is i tie a little little string to the back of the bucket bucket's got about 70 pounds 75 pounds in it if i let this go it wants to unwind well we don't want it to do that what we actually want to do is wind it up all about 10 or 15 or so revolutions maybe 20 i don't know get a good twist on there and then you can just prop something against it to hold it i've just got another piece of uh string here that attaches to my bucket and then i loop it over the the ball hitch from the tractor and then that stops it from unspinning once it hits that so you'll notice immediately whenever you hang it it's going to actually stretch a little bit it's going to tighten those fibers and that's why it's important to actually hang some weight from it they said this is really easy to duplicate primitively by using a tree branch and a deer hide with rocks in it tie it around it and hang it from it so like i said i use about 60 to 70 pounds or so give or take and hang it that's about all the bucket really wants to hold before it falls apart and hang it up and then i'm going to let it just sit here for about 24 hours overnight you'll notice it loses like some moisture there'll be a lot of moisture kind of on the outside dual set on it that kind of stuff it's okay it'll get sticky almost sticky slimy that's fine just let it go until like the end of the afternoon or so let it really kind of dry itself out good after that it's about done so we'll catch up with you when we're to that point okay it's next day and the string is plenty dry to use you'll notice like i said in the morning it'll kind of be tacky or sticky whenever you feel it dries out really easy throughout the day i mean you could probably use the dang thing green right away i just prefer to hang let it dry a little bit lose that moisture really lock those fibers in okay so this is the hickory bow that i did in the stone age bow build project if you've not seen that when you should go luck that video up it's pretty cool built this whole bow with nothing but stone age tools and technology it went out and did some hunts with it shot a hog i just took a bowfish and you've probably seen that video too it already has the yaka string on it that i previously made but the bow that i actually want to put this on is not built yet but i want to show you using this string so what i'll do is i'm going to pop the string off this bow and i'm not going to cut the new string to length yet i can explain how to do that that's pretty self-explanatory really what we're going to do is take the string put it on here test shoot it show you how it goes on just like the other one and what we'll do is we're gonna remember everything on this one is much stiffer okay so the one that i made before is a lot more pliable because we've used it now for quite some time so when you first start with this it's gonna be pretty stiff once you use this thing and it starts breaking in it'll turn into a pretty nice uh string but you notice when you put it on it's gonna be you have to work it around a little bit to kind of get it tight and it's gonna all that stuff when it finally does stretch a little bit it's probably going to make your string feel a little bit long so whenever we hook it into the knock on this side then on the other side we want the loop to be oh i don't know maybe about six inches or so up from the string knock on this side so this takes a little bit of practice getting the knot sized correctly and some people like a bow years not i really prefer a bow line or a bow line in this case because i really like a loop that when i tie that loop as i did on this one it's got a bow line it makes a loop that doesn't slip okay and so i can take it on and off of this bow use it on a different one if i have an issue i can pop it off really easy where the bowy's knot does too if you want to look up a bow year's not that's fine i'm not a big bow yours not kind of guy i'm a bow line or a bowline kind of guy so i've been using that for years and i absolutely love it and it's still easy uh to to back it out and untie it doesn't lock it completely into place and i've never had a single failure at the knot so i'm pretty happy with it but in any event what we're going to do is we're going to stretch put the belt in front of you which is a little awkward here on camera and i'm going to pull this about as tight as i can within reason and pinch it off now i want my loop to be about six inches make it a little bit shorter than you think you need to okay and then we're going to start start our looping process i'll bring you in and let's show you how to do that okay so remember this is for a longer bow anyway but what i'm going to do is i'm going to make a loop lay it over top of this side and i'm gonna take this and you can leave this on for now if you want just leave your loops big enough you can pass it through it does help to kind of cut it off like i said i'm gonna save this one for a longer bow anyway so i would rather just leave everything i can so we came up through this loop i'm going to back almost all of it out okay this is actually going to be the loop that goes in the string knock and then i'm going to come over the top around the main string line and back through our original loop okay so let's slow it down and look at it one more time here you can see what i did is i made a loop right made a loop this way over top and then we're going to come up from the bottom shove that big old knot through there suck up just about all of it because i don't want a ton of slack now this is sticking out so now we're going to do is take this end and we're going to wrap it over the top around and then back oh not under and through but back over and through the same way that it came out originally when we came in okay shove that through okay and then we can go ahead and now just start working the uh all the like the slack out now now is when you can start judging your distance where you want this and remember when you string it up it's probably gonna stretch and lose just a little bit is that not really see how it already slid to me but it's okay if you have to do it a couple times because all you do is you back it out now when you want to back it out the best way to do it in my opinion is start from don't try to take it apart from this side start from the string end and if you shove it forward it'll loosen all of it up much much easier but see that's going to leave you with a really nice loop and then we can string it up and see if it fits okay i just strung it up so there we've got all that extra slack right as you can see it sits right in there and it's a little bit higher brace than i normally like it it's fine just for a couple test shots what i would do is i would shoot it a few times see if it stretches itself right out it's not a bad bracelet it's a little bit high um maybe a half an inch or so and if you want to obviously make the adjustments you just back it out and keep you know re-tying that knot or sliding the rope around till you get exactly where you want it to be so then on the next pieces you have all these little extra fibers that are sticking out and you can go it doesn't hurt a dang thing to leave them on there at all in fact it may even silence your string a little bit whenever you shoot it if you want to trim them down modern times just take a little pair of scissors or fingernail clippers and clip them off and you know stone age times you either leave them or take a sharp little stone flake hold them and cut them through just be careful you don't cut your string in itself okay now long-term care on this i do not like to coat the whole thing in any sort of wax or anything quite honestly because it's just you're just adding mass to this string it's not going to hurt the string to get wet in the least we took it bow fishing i absolutely soaked the bow and the string on multiple occasions it doesn't hurt it at all to get wet there's no reason at all to add anything to this that's just going to give it mess what i do recommend is getting some string makers wax you know which is really just beeswax and pine pitch but you don't even need the pine pitch you can just use beeswax if you want and right where uh the arrow knock is going to be on the bow we'll go ahead and rub it in i'm not going to do it like i said on this one because it's this is meant for a different bow but let's show you the other string what i'm talking about okay so we're back to the string that's actually made for this bow and right where the arrow goes on you might be able to see it on here there is some of the darker discoloration from the string maker's wax i am not afraid to apply this fairly often because one of your top breaking points on a plant fiber string is going to be right at where the arrow knock goes on because it's suffering constant abrasion from that arrow going on and off and so after a good shooting session or what it doesn't hurt to apply a little bit more and if you get to where it is really starting to mount up on here you don't even need to use the wax use your fingers with friction and you'll heat it up and you'll be able to re-spread that wax it'll kind of melt you'll notice it gets right on your fingers and it'll shove it right in to that string knock area and of course like i said we don't want to add it to the rest of it to add any more mass but another spot that gets a lot of wear and tear are the string knocks themselves so make sure that once your bow string is good and set you go ahead and you can rub this stuff in to all of these areas as well then take it off and really work it with your fingers you can actually heat this stuff up and kind of smear it on here and then really massage it with your fingers you can even get a pitch pot or a pinch pot a clay pot and melt some of this stuff down and dip it in that's fine too any way that you want to apply this stuff but use like a wax overall because that'll give it that lubrication to keep it from uh absolutely just tearing this stuff apart at the string knocks and so that's our preventative maintenance i've not had any issues with this one we've done now quite a bit of shooting with it and i'm very confident in what we've got going on here with these yucca strings so then on the other side where this one is cut to length you'll notice that i still leave a pigtail on the end because you never know if time goes by i may may end up with a different bow i want to use the string on or retire this bow and i might need just a little bit more and it doesn't hurt to make a new string either for that matter but i like to have a little extra especially just to kind of if i when i do unstring it it'll keep it tied on so what i do is then i just go ahead and i wrap it around when i tuck it under kind of first but i'll go ahead and wrap this thing around and i'll have some wax on it as well because it'll get kind of sticky that's that pitch wax you know with the pitch mixed in so it's pretty sticky and then i'll just go ahead and lock that into place and some people don't like the way they look when they're tied on you know wrapped around the bottom they don't think it looks very clean quite personally i like the way it looks gives it that really nice primitive look that's up to you if you want to cut it off right here and be done with it that's fine if you want to wrap it around once i wouldn't put a big ball on the end but other than that that's uh it's kind of the ins and outs right there of the yucca bow string and in the future book that i'm working on is we're doing a big data collection of all kinds of primitive archery related things uh bow woods draw links draw lights string material aero material aero weights arrow design all kinds of stuff make sure you're watching out for that book it's going to be a big project that's really going to come out let's say hopefully in the fall here of 2021 uh but of course it'll be on my website hunt primitive.com and i guarantee i'll do a video talking about it but uh we'll go out and be doing a lot of stuff with these yucca bow strings and thus far from the multiple tests that we've done i can shoot the same exact numbers feet per second wise with a yucca string that i do a sin u string so and that's been on every single bow that i've shot it off of i shoot the same exact number or within one feet per second of every sinew string that i use and i have always loved a sinew bowstring for really primitive context bowstring material but now i'm really liking this yucca stuff so the test now is just how long does it last i'll tell you what i've used the crap out of this bowstring and it's lasted a really long time and it shows no signs thus far of breaking but i'll continue the tests with it because only time will tell and if i get any more you know information on that if it lasts you know for another year and two and whatever keeps going then i'll let you guys know and if it breaks the moment i shut the camera off i'll get on and i'll let y'all know that stuff too so so far so good on these i definitely recommend it i also recommend send you bow strings senu it's a very valuable resource as is yaka i suppose but man if i can save my sinew for another project and run a yucca bow string and it's going to last just as long i'm going to do it every time so anyway it does take a little bit longer to make than a sinew string because my fibers i just want to twist them really really tight and lock them in so anyway i hope you enjoy what you learn here with the yucca bow string stuff hopefully you have some luck with it as well and really just i'm working hard really hard especially this year to get you where you want to be with your own primitive building and hunting adventures i mean i love being able to take the stuff that i that i spend just my life i love working on this stuff document it and share it all with you so thanks for following along and hey we'll catch you on the next adventure

Channel: HuntPrimitive

Views: 26,444

Rating: 4.9676471 out of 5

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Id: G2Is9ZsG9Ek

Length: 36min 23sec (2183 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2021