Primitive Bow from Live Tree in 24hrs!

all right guys in this video we are building a primitive white wood bow from a green tree to finish bow in under 24 hours you heard that right i'm talking green live standing in the woods tree it's a finished bow in less than 24 hours but hang on just a sec i want to show you something i want to show you what happens when i unstring this bow now this is not some half green survival bow that you see built on youtube this thing has no string follow it shoots a quick arrow and it's actually a very nice hunting weapon that i would feel very confident taking into the woods and killing game with now if you're in a survival situation you know people say it all the time well in a survival situation it would work well you know what in a survival situation you don't need something that might work you need something that's absolutely going to work and as far as a bow goes this is the technique to use to build a first-rate hunting weapon let's see how we did it so before we get started here i just want to mention briefly that the next video the video is coming up next week i'm going to take this project one step farther and we're actually going to be fire hardening this thing and so if you don't want to miss out on that make sure you subscribe to the channel and you've clicked that bell icon that's going to turn on notifications let's get started so i've got a piece of american elm here that i cut and it's spring time and so uh the sap's flowing and the bark just slipped right off so i'm gonna be using today just a couple of very very simple tools i've got a single bevel knife that i forged out of a an old farrier's rasp i've got a little hand axe or tomahawk that i forged also out of a farrier's rasp and then i've cut a couple of small wedges that i cut out of live oak like the ones that you see behind me here so i'm gonna see if i can split this i don't know if i can split it i don't know if this has got much twist to it or not i can't really tell the bark or the the grain underneath that bark on this elm trees really strange looking i'm going to start my split with my uh my little knife here then i'm going to drive some wedges in it [Music] each ring it doesn't seem like it runs in line it seems like it's it's twisted like this the rings are offset and so it causes this weird twisty stuff when you try to split it out with wedges so i think i'm just going to have to cut it cut it out the wedges are not going to work on this wood it's just too too twisted up in there and so we're just gonna have to cut it out just hack the belly side off i was trying to save some work but not gonna happen now the thing that got me thinking about this was a video that i saw a little while back by thad beckham and keith shannon where they were talking about taking a little hickory stave from just a live green tree to finish bow in three days i watched that video and i thought it was very well done it's great if you haven't checked it out i would highly recommend watching that but they've they built a very very nice very nice bow in three days and so i wanted to take that same concept and see if i could condense that time and make a bow in under 24 hours so so shhh so so mmm um so [Music] hmm so all right time to build a fire so all right so i'm gonna end up cheating on this a little bit i've got my back set jig here you can see that i've got some little tabs on there and so what i'm gonna do is just use these tabs to straighten this bow out as it dries so i'm just going to stick it down in there like that which is going to bend it a little bit beyond where it needs to be all right it's all clamped down so when that dries it ought to be pretty dull going straight so i went ahead and and threw these pieces of tin up here just to help guide that heat up onto this bow and it's right now it's way too hot i think it would melt my clamps there if i put it on there but i'm just going to let that burn down a little bit rake those coals out and then i'll put a couple of cross pieces up here and just set that bow belly side down up on top of there and i might throw a piece of tint on top just to i'm not trying to heat treat this thing right now i'm just trying to dry it out as fast as i can just as an experiment i've never tried this before so we're just going to see how fast we can drive the moisture down in this wood to below 10 percent so that we can start working on a bow you i'm gonna flip it around because it seems like the right hand side here is maybe a little warmer so i'll just leave it here and i'll just try to keep this warm in here we'll see how long it takes to get her down but it's there's no cracks at all in the belly which is good that's exactly what i wanted to find just let it keep going all right so i've let this thing go all night and it's actually still warm in there um i came out here last night about 7 30 and just made sure everything was good it was still burning really nice and low i don't know what the temperature was in there i'm going to guess 160 maybe but it probably you know when the fire was really going it probably got pretty hot i'd say maybe maybe up towards 200 degrees even but we shall see what what it did so this is real smoky so the wood is i mean everything's been smoked for hours the clamps are just really loose the wood's really dried out and contracted and i mean it is super super light very light and straight look at that that is beautiful i'm gonna get my moisture meter and see what it's reading so in the handle here we're reading 10 and that's on the back on the belly side that was exposed to the heat more it's not even registering so it's probably less than five percent i'm gonna go ahead and stick it in the back down here at the tips just to see i'll stick it in the side and see what it does five percent right there i think five percent as low as this moisture meter will go so we've got our wood dry and that's less than 24 hours after this thing was just a green sapling and there's no cracks no cracks at all in this thing now if we had tried to do this with osage we'd ruin the stave but this elm seems to be tough enough to handle it now the trick is to see if we can get a bow tillered out of this thing without breaking it now i went ahead when i was pre-tillering this thing when it was green i went ahead and went down pretty pretty near pretty thin on these limbs and so i'm not i'm not trying to get a heavyweight bow you know if i can get a 40 pound bow out of this i'll be very happy so let's start uh start in on the tillering so uh oh you getting there it's actually not too bad for the first stringing brace heights a little high feels like it's probably around 40 pounds at 28. i haven't got it there yet but this will that would definitely kill a hog or a deer absolutely i'm very impressed very impressed less than 24 hours from living standing green tree to a bow that's capable not just capable but would be very effective so i've got it probably to 27. there's 28 inches right there that is impressive but i think i'm going to take it one step farther i'm going to try to heat treat not just heat treat to fire harden the belly on this bow and see if i can't make it even better not too bad i

Channel: Clay Hayes

Views: 533,965

Keywords: primitive bow, survival bow, best survival bow, whitewood, flatbow, selfbow, bow building, live tree, green tree, quick survival bow, survival skills, american elm, elm, hickory, bow and arrow, archery, self reliance, moisture content, tillering, bushcraft, primitive survival, primitive, flat bow, self bow, longbow, clay hayes, fire hardening, fire, bow stave, wood bow, bow

Id: b9I8cUuRqMQ

Length: 20min 10sec (1210 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 29 2021