Is this the BEST Survival Bow? - Penobscot Primitive Bow

on today's video we're going to be making a Penobscot bow like you see right here now this thing looks really funky and you might be asking yourself why in the world would I want to make something like that other than it's cool well the main reason is if you don't have access to high quality or big bow wood you can make a hunting weight bow with very small or otherwise inferior bow wood using this method I'll show you how so for this build we're going to be using service Berry this is actually a pretty good bow wood this particular piece is just way too small to get a hunting weight bow and so with this Penobscot design I'm hoping that we're going to be able to get a bow up into the 45 to 50 pounds range for big game hunting thank you foreign [Applause] [Applause] thank you sorry thank you foreign [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] foreign [Applause] [Applause] [Laughter] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] thank you [Applause] foreign [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] foreign foreign [Music] all right [Applause] so this is green wood meaning that if I tried to string this up right now and make a bow out of it it's just gonna be super sluggish it's going to stay bent it's not going to have any cast and so we need to dry this wood out and fire Harden the belly a little bit I first heard about these techniques on a video that fad Beckham did and then I went up and spent some time with Keith Shannon which was also integral in that video and learned a bunch from those guys so if you haven't checked out their videos go over there to thad's channel and check them out we've got some good stuff so I just left this bow hanging over this long fire for the remainder of the day and then overnight trying to drive out as much moisture as I could foreign [Music] [Applause] [Laughter] [Applause] [Laughter] [Applause] [Laughter] foreign thank you the string we're going to be using today is made out of deer back straps in you this is actually a string that I made in a previous video we're just going to repurpose it for this bow so I don't have to go through the whole process again foreign this area right here is super stiff take some wood out from right here [Music] okay foreign [Applause] so this Stave just doesn't feel as crisp and snappy as I want when you push on it it just doesn't snap back like I want it to so I think the moisture content in here is still a little bit High I'm going to put it back on the fire for a couple hours and see if we can't dry it out maybe fire Harden the belly just a little bit foreign right there so right here in this area it got a little bit scorched got a little bit too hot but hopefully it's not scorched enough that it's gonna break it we'll have to see kind of let that get away from me a little bit let this cool down and then bend on a little bit and see what it does all right so what I should do now is just wait and do this tomorrow let it soak up some humidity but I am impatient so we're going to give it a try hope for the best definitely feels much better much springier foreign so at this point I've got a bow that's capable of taking small game like squirrels and growls it's fairly lightweight but I want to build something that packs enough punch for big game and that's where the panops got design really shines it allows you to use small diameter stuff or inferior bow wood to build powerful hunting weapons it does this by laminating or mounting a smaller bow to the back of a larger one and what this does is distributes the stresses in the bow the tension and compression over two bows but it also allows you to take the forces that are built into those bows and transfer it to a single Arrow we're going to use the inner bark to lash these two bows together foreign so for this string that goes from here to here I'm just going to use a piece of leftover nettle cordage from a bow string that I attempted to make that did not work very well so it seems to be functioning right got tension here it definitely increased the poundage this side here I think I'm going to tighten up a little bit so I'm gonna undo this I think you could actually adjust the tiller on this Bow by how how you adjust these things these arrows that I've got here are left over from another project that I did last year the 24 hour bow build actually built this bow in 24 hours as well with Force drying and fire hardening over this trench fire behind us foreign that's probably 26 inches and it's getting on up 45 pounds or so all right we're going to try to crank this thing on back a little bit that's a full 28 inches and I'm I don't have a scale here with me but I'm gonna guess that the weight is a little over 50 pounds very nice very nice all right guys so overall thoughts Impressions uh assessment of this bow design I think in the right type of circumstances where you don't have access to good bow Woods this right here is a way to get a very capable hunting weapon in your hands and I built this in 24 hours this is not a bow that's what most people think of as survival those survival most most survival bows suck they're green wood they have very little cast they're barely capable of taking small game but something like this if you can get within 10 yards or so of an animal and you've got decent Arrows with good Stone tips or something like this this bow is perfectly capable of taking deer-sized game one of the cool things about this design is that I could increase the weight of this bow if I wanted to Simply by tightening the cordage between the two bows here and putting a little bit more strain on this top bow eating good tonight well that's foam but you know you get the point not too bad for a little sapling

Channel: Clay Hayes

Views: 3,138,546

Keywords: primitive bow, Penobscot bow, survival bow, selfbow, bushcraft, survival skills, bow and arrow, double bow, cable backed bow, primitive survival, archery, primitive weapon, primitive bow and arrow, wood bow, fire hardened, fire hardened bow, bow building, bow making, primitive bow building, far cry primal bow, far cry primal

Id: q8A1aSW_Q_s

Length: 26min 45sec (1605 seconds)

Published: Sat May 20 2023