Self Bow Building for Beginners - Complete Guide

all right folks so we are back in the shop today we're going to be doing some bow building uh i was asked to write an article for outdoor life about how to build a bow and i figured well if i'm going to be building a bow and taking pictures i might as well make a video as well so this video is going to be very very basic this is going to be directed at people who are very new to bow building people who have never built a bow before and so we're going to go through everything start to finish we've got a hickory log here it's relatively small diameter i'm going to use a very basic tool kit something that really anybody can get very cheaply and we're going to talk about all the terminology we're going to talk about why we do certain things things that a lot of people will kind of gloss over in some of the more advanced videos so with that let's just go ahead and jump right on into it the reason that i am choosing hickory for this build there's a couple of reasons one it's very easy to get if you're in the eastern u.s you can find hickory from florida to new york state and everywhere in between number two it's a very tough wood it's a very good wood for beginners you can make some mistakes and still come out with a functional bow and number three is you don't have to with hickory you don't have to cut this wood and wait years for this stuff to season uh like you do with things like you and osage and some of the top tier bow woods with hickory you could go out today go out into the woods cut a tree down and start making a bow it's the the grain interlocks and so when you cut this stuff normally what would happen is like if i went and cut a piece of osage took the bark and the sapwood off and started making a bow that same day as that bow wood dries it'll dry too rapidly and it'll cause cracks up and down the boat it'll cause checks hickory will do that but not nearly to the extent that other woods will and so when hickory dries fast it'll open up tiny little cracks but they're they're kind of superficial they don't really matter and so what you can do is you can go out of the woods you can cut a piece of wood strip the bark off of it rough a bow out uh rough a bow out of this stuff while it is sopping wet and green and then you can actually force dry this stuff and you could make a bow in less than 24 hours with hickory now this particular piece of wood that we're using right here this is a piece of water hickory that i cut in alabama and i cut this one several years ago and so this one's already pretty dry but you could if you wanted to you can go out and cut a green tree make a bow in just a day or two all right let's go over the tool selection that we're going to be using here for this build i wanted to go very very simple on the tools the main tool that i'm going to be using is my draw knife here now i get questions all the time about where where where can i get a draw knife what kind of draw knife do i need all of the knives that i use except for one that was custom built for me they're all old vintage greenlee knives this one has a 10 inch blade i like a 10 inch i would say go with a 10 inch if you can find one certainly don't go with anything less than 8 inches i feel like with less than 8 inches it's just hard to get around a big stave like this these old vintage knives are heavy duty they're thick and you need something that's thick and heavy to stand up to the the torque that you're going to be putting on these things during the bow building process now you can find these things on ebay for somewhere between 50 and 80 bucks usually uh and they're good quality knives like i said greenlee just get on ebay type in green lead draw knife and you should be able to find some of these things and i'm sure there's other manufacturers of these things these old vintage knives i'm just this is what i have and this these have been around my place forever these were probably my great uncle or grandfather or something like that i don't know where they came from they just been around the house here so we've got a draw knife some sort of ruler you don't have to have one of these fold out things just a one one foot regular ruler will work just something for layout we're going to be using a pencil a chalk line tape measure some sort of big rasp this is a farrier's rasp uh used for horses hooves you can get these from three rivers or any of the like farm and ranch stores uh horseshoeing supply anything like that these things are fantastic and then some sort of hatchet or tomahawk or something like that for roughing out now this is all you need to build this bow i to save time uh i'm going to be using a power plane on the side i'll show you you'll see that in a minute if you don't have that it's not a problem i've built hundreds of bows and i've used that like onto so it's just not time saver you don't need it this is basically all you need right here very very simple tool kit alright so let's get started now with this piece of wood if you look down this piece of wood you'll notice that it's got a little bit of a sweep kind of going this way and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to rotate this piece of wood so that that sweep is going down now what we're going to do is we're going to use this top the part that's on top with that sweep going down like this we're going to use this as what's called the back of the bow now the back is what is when you're holding the bow the back is actually facing away from you the belly side of the bow is what's facing you or what's towards you as you're holding the bow so we're going to have the back here the belly down here now i'm going to take uh take my draw knife and i'm going to take the bark and the cambium off of this piece of wood being very careful not to dig into the actual wood all i want to do is take the bark off of it and then that very thin layer between the bark and the wood that's called the cambium we're going to take all that stuff off and then we're going to use our string line to pop a line right down the center of this and then we're going to lay off or we're going to lay the bow out off of that center line now this is a great method for clean straight wood like this hickory stave now if you have some other piece of wood that has some wiggle to it [Applause] the string line method is not going to work very well i i go into much greater detail over on my patreon site i've got a bunch of bow building videos on there or the dvd set that i put out so if you're working with wood that is not straight there's some other methods but we're not going to get into that in this video so i'm going to start taking the bark and the uh the cambium off of this set my tools over here now this bow building bench that i got here this i'm going to get some questions on this um these you can get something if you're going to get into mobility you can get something very similar to this at stavemaster.com they're great benches but i mean they're relatively expensive and so if you're just going to be building a bow or two you don't need this all you need is a bench vise attached to a table but if you're going to go that route you need to make sure that it is very very sturdy uh because you will if it's just mounted to a wooden bench or something you will pull that thing all over your shop trying to get the get a bow built and so throw you a couple of sacks of quikrete or something up there to make it heavy and go to town so we're just going to use this bevel down again being very careful not to get down into the wood so you can get through the heavy bark and then this brown stuff that you're seeing that's the cambium that's that layer underneath once you get the bulk of it off you can turn your draw knife up start using it like a scraper and that'll help you get down through that stuff without digging into the wood itself so i'm just going to clean up the very top of this thing that top spine and then i'm going to pop the pop the line because most of this stuff is going to go away now if there's any little pin knots or anything like that you need to be very careful especially in this in this process because if you're coming along with your draw knife and you hook one of those pin knots you're you're going to dig down into the grain now with hickory like i said it's a great beginner's wood it lets you get away with some of those mistakes but it's best if you if you can leave them intact or leave the grain intact around them so if you're doing this with hickory that you cut in the springtime when the bark or when the sap is up all you've got to do you could just peel the bark off of this stuff and then you have a pristine uh wood underneath that bark for your back this is if you cut it in the winter time or after the woods dry like this it's a lot more work [Music] all right so if you did happen to gouge down into this if you are using hickory it's not a huge deal most of the time all you got to do is just kind of smooth those things out and a lot of times it helps if you come at it from across the grain because if you come at it straight uh with the grain it's going to want to run that grain out it'll kind of hook under the grain and the grain will just keep going and so if you come out at an angle a lot of times you can cut those off and just kind of smooth them out or you can do it with sandpaper if your wood's dry got a little gouge here all right so we've got the bark and cambium for the most part off of the uh what's going to be the back of this bow so now i'm just going to lay this up here we're going to pop a line right down the middle of this thing all right so i've got the center line popped on this stave uh the back is ready to go and we're ready to start laying this bow out now we're going to make this thing 64 inches overall which for my draw length which is about 29 inches that's perfect if you are if you've got a shorter draw say 26 27 or a longer draw you need to adjust a little bit what i do is take my draw length multiply it by about 2.24 or something like that and that's going to give you a good starting point for the overall length of your bow so there's a couple of different ways to lay this out if you get my book i'm going to show you a little bit different way in there that i'm going to show you in this video but for this uh since this video is targeted towards very uh new bowyers we're just going to lay this thing out perfectly symmetrical and so i've already cut this wood 64 inches and so 64 inches total length we're just going to come to 32 we're going to make a mark right there we're going to go up two inches and down two inches and that is going to be our handle section now out from that we're going to come out another say two inches or so doesn't matter you can go three inches and this is going to be your fades the area where your narrow handle flares out into the full width of your limbs and then also the depth of your handle kind of fades down into the uh the final thickness of the limbs so we're going to go uh up two inches from that down two inches two four six eight so we're gonna have an eight inch stiff riser section in this bow and at this point the reason that i'm laying it out symmetrically like this like normally what i would do is i would shift my handle down towards the bottom limb just a little bit which is going to make a shorter bottom limb and a little bit longer top limb not going to go into why you'd want to do that in this video but the reason i'm laying out symmetrically like this is because you can when we get into the tillering process you can flip this bow uh end over in and it doesn't matter which is the top and so it gives you more flexibility as we move on with this bow building process okay so we've got got our eight inch riser section uh laid out here now i'm gonna come to the knock ends and i'm gonna put a couple of marks on either side of this line that we popped i like very fine knocks that's one of the mistakes that people make when they start when they get into bow building is they make their knocks way way way too big the when people shoot self bows that are poorly made they have what's called a lot of hand shock and so when you shoot that bow it'll rattle in your hands it's just uncomfortable to shoot they're sluggish they're inefficient they're not very fun to shoot at all that hand shock comes from energy that's left over in the bow and a lot of that energy is because there's just a bunch of mass in the limb tips and so anything that you can do to reduce mass in the limb tips will go a long way in making this this bow much funner to shoot much more efficient much sweeter and so i make my knocks pretty small i'd say about 3 8 of an inch wide on the end i wouldn't go any wider than a half inch and you can go on down to very very fine and some people make what's called needle knocks or pin knocks which are incredibly fine knocks so i'm going to go about a quarter inch on each side of this line make a mark and then so that's going to give us a half inch knock which we're going to thin that down or narrow that down here a little bit later so i'm going to come down let's see so these are 28 inch limbs i'm going to come down 14 inches we're going to split this limb into quarters so we're going to go 14 we'll come down seven and then 21 and we'll go do the same thing on the slim 7 14 21. so i'm gonna go find a straight edge to help me lay this limb out you should be able to round one up somewhere oh here's one right here i forgot to mention this in the tools all right so for this bow we're gonna make this thing about inch and a half or so wide that's going to be the widest part of our limb now what we're going to do is we're going to from this handle section here the top of our handle we're going to make this maybe an inch wide we're going to flare out to that inch and a half we're going to hold that inch and a half till the mid limb and then we're going to taper into our half inch nocks very very simple design so what i'm going to do is come off each side of this line about three quarters of an inch okay i'm gonna find a straight edge i'm just gonna connect if you can find somebody to help you with this part you could be ahead of the game got our one limb profile on there now we'll do the other one we go we've got the profile drawn on the back so we've got our handles about an in little over an inch or so wide we flare out over two inches to that inch and a half the limb holds that inch and a half all the way out to about mid limb then it tapers down to half inch knox it's a it's a symmetrical design it's exactly the same on both sides so when we move forward we can flip this thing over depending on which which top which limb we want to be the top just gives you a little bit more flexibility so now what we need to do is basically take off everything that is outside of this profile front to back now you can do this with a hatchet you can do it with a power plane a band saw if you have one the tool that you use is very critical i'm going to use a hatchet to start just to kind of show you what you would do but then i'm going to move to a hand plane just to save some time [Music] so when you're working on this front to back profile cutting this profile out the biggest thing that you want to watch out for is that the sides of your limbs you need to be square with the back or relatively square now that's kind of a hard thing to judge seeing as how this crown or this uh the stave is round you don't have a square back and so you have what's called a crown to it that natural outside curvature of that tree and so what you're going to have to do is just kind of average across that and keep your sides uh square to that instead of having like a trapezoidal type shape when you get done with this thing so i'm going to go ahead and just move to the power plane knock some of this stuff off we'll get the front to back profile cut out and that's going to put us into a position to start moving on with actually moving or removing some belly wood so that we can get this these limbs actually bending all right so we're getting down pretty close to our lines uh on this front to back profile now i've got a lot of meat back here we just need to knock off a bunch of this stuff and so what i'm going to do right now is just draw kind of a preliminary line on the on the sides of the limb the side of the bow and we'll just take whatever tools you have access to if you have a band saw that's great you could even do a lot of it with a skill saw or if you don't have anything with a draw knife eat your wheaties because it's a lot of work so where's my pencil so i'm not going to make any measurements here i'm just going to eyeball everything so i'm going to take my handle marks and just transfer them over here to the side so we can see them on both sides and then down here in the limb i'm just going to take my finger and just come down to we'll say for right now three quarters of an inch or so that'll give us plenty of room so if we go a little deep it's not a big deal draw a line there a line here and then in the handle we'll go obviously a little deeper a couple two inches or so doesn't really matter draw some rough fades on there something like that do the same thing on this side these lines are just a reference these are really not important at all just going to give us a reference line for knowing where our limbs are and so we don't get don't get things messed up and end up taking up taking off too much where we're not supposed to all right so everything from there down needs to go away and then it's going to kind of start looking like a bow one quick way to do this is to take a chop saw and come in on just outside your fades go down a little bit or you do with a handsaw make a couple of slots and then you can take a pry bar or something to stick in there and just kind of wedge a big hunk of this wood off the belly that blade is incredibly dull [Music] grief right there make good handle for something attach it handle so we've got this thing cut down right almost to our lines on our back profile we've got quite a bit of the belly wood knocked off this thing's kind of starting to look like a bow uh still a lot of wood that's got to come off so what i've done is you just use whatever tools you have at your disposal to get it down to these lines so you can use a bandsaw a hatchet power or a power plane skill saw even if uh if you can if you're skilled enough to use that basically whatever you can do to get this thing down to the lines and then you want to move into a rasp and do some fine tuning so i'm going to use my my farrier's rasp and i'm going to take this these sides right on down to the lines that we drew that inch and a half width on our limbs pretty doggone good right there so if you look down that piece of wood that's front to back that's the basically the shape of the bow other than the handle section here it's still full width so we'll go ahead and dish this out a little bit go down to our lines that we drew probably going to have to move back to the draw knife for that a little bit all right so that's pretty good we've got uh got the back profile right on down to basically everything handle limbs uh limb tips right on down to the half inch knocks i'm gonna go ahead and just smooth these sides up a little bit with the fine side of my rasp and then we'll be ready to draw some lines all right that is good enough so now what we're going to do is we're going to draw the depth of our handle we're going to draw the fades on here and we're going to draw our approximate limb thickness on this i'm probably going to start about a half an inch a half inch deep that's going to give us some room for air the limbs are actually going to end up probably less than 3 8 so if we go with a half an inch that's going to give us an eighth inch to play with i'm going to take my pencil from my handle here i'm going to just get a little bit of a set with my thumb right there about two inches or so make a little mark come down here make a little mark come to the other side do the same thing now if you have a compass that you can put a pencil in like a drawing compass that i use that quite a bit in my uh in my bow building i didn't i'm not going to use it on this build because i'm trying to do this with as few tools as possible but if you have one they come in very handy because you can set the depth and then there's no guess work at all okay so on the limbs i'm going to come about a half inch deep i'm just going to draw a line right on down the limb all the way to the knock same thing on this side this is where that compass really comes in handy all right so now what we're going to do is going to take our lines that we marked on the back for our handle and our riser we're going to transfer those over to the side so we can see them and now we're gonna find something that's round doesn't matter what it is this is an old uh chop saw blades probably uh ten and a half or so inches diameter just get you something that's about this size if you want tighter fades or shorter fades you can use something smaller like a paint can lid or something like that if you want your face to be longer grab something bigger i'm just going to use this to trace out my fades on here i'm basically just lining it up with the end of the fade here top of the handle here stick it on there so it crosses those two intersections and just grab your line like so all right there we go so now back to removing wood basically everything above this line is going to come off and what we're going to shoot for hopefully is a fairly flat side on the belly and if you were to take this limb and cut it into a cross section as rectangular as you can get it now you're not going to be able to get a perfect rectangle because this thing does have a you know you have that that rounded that radius the outside of the tree that's the crown of this stave and so you're not going to get a perfect rectangle but you can get pretty doggone close all right so i'm going to work this right on down to the line i'm going to get it pretty close and then i'll pick this up when i move to the rasp and start flattening this belly out and making it look like a bow all right so i'm down pretty doggone close to these these lines uh with my draw knife now the fades right here those you can do those with a draw knife but they're pretty hard to get in there and get that radius and so the easiest way to do that i'm gonna cheat a little bit here i'm gonna bring in a different tool that i didn't mention earlier but the easiest way to do that is with a sharp broad chisel like this this is probably i don't know inch and a half wide chisel but i'm going to take it in here i'm going to put it at a little bit of an angle to the limb and i'll give you a close-up show you exactly what i'm talking about but i'm just going to chisel these fades out and if you get a little bit of practice with this you can actually be pretty doggone uh accurate with this and basically follow that line perfectly so i'll find a hammer to show you exactly how to do that so what you're going to want to do you don't want to put your chisel perfectly square to the bow you want to kick it to the side a little bit so you have a little bit of an angle we're going to chisel this one then we'll turn it the other way chill the other side and then we'll do this one and this one i'm going to start right here so you can see what i'm what i'm working on and i'm going to do it a little bit at a time i'm not going to try to take the whole bite at once oh another very important thing always use it bevel down if you use it bevel up like that it's going to want to dig into your wood and you're not going to be satisfied with the results pretty close that's pretty doggone good we can get the rest of that with a round rasp i'm going to do this other side and again i tilted it this way then kind of tilt it the other way pretty nice all right so that looks very very nice right there we can just clean this up with the uh a rasp and if you have one a half round rasp like this works very nice you have another tool i didn't tell you about earlier but you can do it flat file if you if you need now one thing i want to point out on this is you want a smooth transition in from your fade into your limb you don't want an angle there if you have it down and then have an angle right here that's going to be a stress point right there you need that nice smooth transition all right so day two working on this bow um so what we accomplished is we've got this uh the belly side knocked off it's kind of starting to look like a bow a little bit limbs are still very very thick they're probably three quarters of an inch thick or so we got the lin the the belly wood all the way down to that first line that i drew now what i've done on this side is i've gone ahead and drawn another line now this one is about 3 8 inch deep from the back of the bow which is here so this edge right here come in about 3 8 draw another line just like we did before now this line that's going to be pretty close to our finished uh limb thickness and so when we're going to this line you need to be very careful that you don't go below that so i did this just like the the time that i did before i'm gonna flip it over here and just kind of do the same thing so about 3 8 inch deep and if you have a compass where you can put a pencil in there or a fine tip sharpie and get it exact that's going to help but i'm gonna go ahead and do it without that that side and we'll get this side we're gonna take our trusty worn out chop saw blade and draw our fades on and we're basically going to repeat what we did before we're going to get down pretty close to this with our draw knife and then i'm going to fine tune it with the rasp getting right to the rest now on this last one we kind of just flatten it off a little bit on this one what i want to do is i want to create like a ridge running down this limb so right now the limbs about three quarters of an inch thick all the way down uh we redrew our lines at 3 8. so what i want to do is take my draw knife and my rasp and the limb right now is flat i want to come at this thing with my tool at an angle like this so i'm going to take one edge off i'm going to flip it to the other side i'm going to take the other edge off and what that's going to do is create if we took this limb and took a cross section out of it you're gonna have two parallel sides and then you're gonna have a peak or a ridge running right down the middle it's gonna be shaped kind of like a house now what that's gonna do is it's gonna allow us to get very accurate on our sides it's going to leave that ridge in the middle and then as we're tillering it we're going to start taking that ridge down and flattening that thing down [Music] okay all right so i've got this thing down pretty close to the line it's probably about a sixteenth of an inch uh to the line all the way down i'm gonna flip it around i'm gonna do the other limb and then we'll come back with the rasp and get it right down exactly to the line and as long as we did a good job scribing our line or a limb thickness on the same on each side we should come out with a perfectly or as close as you can get it to perfectly rectangular cross section on this thing of course taking into account the crown on the back of this thing and if we can do that that's going to be put us in a very good position to start bending these limbs and tiller in this bow if we can get this thing perfectly parallel all the way down the same thickness all the way down theoretically it should bend it evenly at that point because our limbs are tapered from wide to narrow knocks we're still off of our line here just a little bit sixteenth of an inch or so i'm gonna go ahead and move to the rasp and get these edges right down to the line but what a lot of people want to do is they see that line they want to get to it quickly and so they they put their tool at a very steep angle like that because you can get to the line very quickly that way but you're not really doing anything you're not removing any material and so what you need to do is pick an angle for your tool that's going to get whatever wood you're removing you want to go all the way to the middle of the limb so that's an angle about like that so when you start this avoid coming at it like this because if you do that you're just going to take a very little off the side you need to bring that slope in so that you end up with another ridge running down the middle we'll get this side right on down to the line then we'll come to this side and bring that to the line another tip i'll give you is when you're rasping make sure that you go from the outside of the limb in because if you go the other way if you go this way you're gonna pull splinters off the side and you're gonna have to deal with that later so keep an eye on those lines on the edges of your limb make sure that you don't go below those because like i said this three-eighths your your limbs gonna end up being a little bit thinner than this but not a whole lot you don't have a lot of tolerance here so be very careful so here's our line right here we're going to bring this wood right on down to the edge of it making sure that our angle on our tool is not too steep ah all right so that's pretty good so now i'm going to go ahead and just take this thing we've right now we've got this peak running down the middle we've got a little hump in it i'm going to just flatten that out side to side making sure that you know if i'm if i'm focusing on this side making sure that i'm not going down below on this side so you got to keep an eye on both so [Music] all right so that limb is pretty good the belly side is is pretty flat now we need to move to this side do the same thing [Music] pretty good all right so at this point we've got our sides are parallel they're straight up and down our belly side is pretty much flat and we've got something that's really starting to look like a bow and it should start to bend a little bit so our limbs right now in the middle are probably still close to a half inch because we have that little crown on the back uh but the sides are right about 3 8. so if we put the tip on the ground and push it and see we're getting some nice flex to it and so i can see right now that there's we've got a nice smooth bend from the riser to the nock and that's exactly what you want if you see anywhere that it looks like it's weak or where it looks like you're getting in getting an angle in your bend you want to stop you want to mark that spot because that's a weak spot and if you have a weak spot that's called a hinge you need to take wood off of everywhere else to catch it up with that we're going to talk more about that when we talk more about tillering all right so at this point we could go a couple of different directions we could just go ahead and move straight into the tillering process we could finish this bow off and just have a raw hickory uh flat bow now if you are just getting into bow building if this is your first bow or maybe your first couple of bows that's probably the route that i would recommend that you just move straight into tillering and and go with a raw bow the the problem with doing that is that hickory although it's a great beginner's bow wood because it is so tough it's so durable it does have a tendency to take what is called set so when you draw a bow you're stressing you're compressing the wood on the belly and hickory a raw hickory bow doesn't resist that compression very well and so when you draw that bow and stress all of that wood on the belly side it compresses it and it doesn't spring back the way that a very nice or efficient bow would and so you get set or it stays bent you don't want that in a bow but if this is your first bow or your first couple bows like i said so what it doesn't matter um you're just after you're trying to get a functional bow if it has a little bit of set it doesn't matter you're going to get better over time as you build more bows the other way that we could go is that we could heat treat the belly which is going to harden the belly and make it more resistant to compression and less likely to take set another way to refer to set is string follow it basically when you unstring this bow it's going to stay kind of in that in that strung or braced position it's not going to spring back all the way like it is right now with the limb tips forward of the handle that's the route that i'm going to go with this bow but if you are new if this is your first bow i would probably recommend that you skip this step and just move straight and just pick this up when we start tillering this thing again so what we're going to do is move over here i've got a jig or a form that i've made that is we're going to clamp this thing to and it's going to put in back set basically what it is it's a long board that i've got we're going to clamp this thing to it and it's going to push these limbs down which is going to make these limb tips rest farther forward of the handle we're gonna clamp it into that position we're gonna take a heat gun and we're gonna cook the belly side of this which is gonna drive out all the moisture and it's gonna harden this belly wood and it's going to make this a more efficient bow so let's get started with that here's what we've got going on i've got my form here all this is is a like a two by six it's got about a 20 inch flat in the middle and then the the ends just slope off i'm going to clamp this down back towards the form so belly side up these forms are easy to make i get questions all the time about how to make them there's nothing to it take you a two by six take a piece of pvc pipe or something else that's flexible it's got a nice bend to it secure the ends pull it this way trace the uh trace the bends out cut it out and rasp it off to smooth and you're good to go all right so we've got this thing on our form here now what i'm going to do is take my heat gun doesn't matter what kind of heat gun you get you can get ones with variables variable heat dials on the side this is just a plain old wagoner probably cost 25 bucks at home depot you don't need an expensive heat gun you control your heat not by the dial on the side but by how far you are from the wood and how fast you're moving and so i'm going to set a timer and for each one of these limbs i'm going to heat them for about half an hour i'm going to maintain about an inch or so of space between the end of my heat gun and this limb and i'm just going to keep moving like this back and forth back and forth until your 30 minutes is up and do this one for 30 minutes and i'm going to move to this one and then once we're done you're going to start seeing uh just maybe 10 15 minutes in you're going to start seeing this wood darken that's fine you want we don't want to scorch the wood or burn the wood but we do want to see a little bit of a color change another thing that you might see happen is if you look closely if the wood has a relatively high moisture content i'd say above maybe 10 12 you might start seeing some tiny little cracks open up with the grain in here that's fine don't worry about that those are superficial i'm going to start a timer and start heating [Applause] so about this speed is what you want back and forth it's gonna take you a while i'm gonna go ahead and stop the camera and pick you guys up on the back side of this and then we'll continue on with the process all right so we've got the heat treat done i've spent 30 minutes heating each one of these limbs and i actually went a little bit shallower than what i had recommended my one inch recommendation i was for for most of the time i was somewhere between a quarter and a half inch just slowly moving back and forth across these limbs so i'm gonna go ahead and take this thing out of the form and i i did end up adding another clamp here to the center because this stave had just a little bit of a roll to it and when you pull this thing out you should come up with something like this now what this state this this bend away from the belly and towards the back this is called back set this is going to give you a more efficient bow because basically it pre-loads the limbs with uh with tension when you when you bend these limbs down and have a string on this thing and this bow is braced it takes much more energy just to get the bow to that braced position and so when you go to draw you're already starting from a higher draw weight and so you're going to have a much faster much more efficient bow if you start out with a profile with a side profile like this with back set than if you do if you're starting off with a bow with straight limbs or the opposite end of the spectrum a bow with set or string follow where you actually have uh the opposite bend or a bend that is towards the the string or the belly side of the bow that would be inefficient so now what we can do is let's go ahead and just see what we've got here put that on the ground and bend a little bit now that added a lot of weight to it so what we're going to end up doing is first thing i'm going to do before i do anything else is i'm going to take these sharp edges off of where the side meets the back i'm just going to kind of run a scraper or a file across that just to kind of radius that out just a little bit and take that sharp edge off and then we're going to start taking some wood off the belly so that we can reduce the weight a little bit and get this thing bending just a little bit more while i've got this thing in my vise i'm going to go ahead and take this knock section so about the last eight inches or so of this limb and really round this off so we get ready to cut our knocks in [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] all right we've got the uh the edges on the back uh rounded off just a little bit got the tips rounded over right here so that we can file our knocks in there when we get ready to do that just want to put this thing on the ground and bend on it a little bit and see what she looks like now what we're looking for is a nice smooth bend and evenness from side to side that's pretty good all right so at this point we are ready to move into the meat and potatoes of bow building and that is tillering so tillering refers to uh removing wood from stiff areas of these limbs to make the air the make the limbs bend evenly side to side and then also make the limbs bend on a nice smooth arc and so we're looking for stiff spots we're looking for weak spots and if we have a weak spot we need to mark that spot so we don't remove any more wood from there and then we're going to have to remove wood from everywhere else to catch it up to that now we want to do everything we can to try to avoid that type of situation where we're fixing problems and that's why i had you spend so much time setting this thing up with a rectangular cross section and making sure everything is even making sure your edges are even from riser to the the knocks if you didn't do a good job there and setting this thing up you're going to go into the tillering process already having to correct problems so go back watch that section of this video again and make sure that you set everything up properly and if you do that if you've got a nice smooth taper if everything's tapered out right and even it's going to make the tillering go a whole lot smoother so right now if you did everything correctly you should have a nice smooth bend from riser to knock and everything should be relatively even side to side uh so right now i've got that but the bow is still way too heavy right now this bow if i could get a string on it is probably pulling close to 100 pounds and so what we need to do is start removing wood from the belly side of this bow to lower weight on this thing but we also have to keep an eye on our tiller from side to side making sure things are even and then also that we've got a nice smooth arc over these limbs and so what i'm going to do is turn this thing belly side up i'm going to turn my draw knife up and i'm going to start using this as a scraper and because we've already got things set up right everything's even from noc2 or from knock to riser i'm going to take long even strokes off of this thing so that we don't dig any holes and have to correct those problems later so i'm not going to start scraping like this little scrapes like that because that's going to make a thin spot in the limb i want to make a long even stroke all the way down this thing now one thing i want to warn you of at this point if you're if you are using one of these benches or even if you're at a uh a vice and have this thing in there as you get closer to yourself people have a tendency to roll their tools over right right in here and so what that's going to do is you're going to get a thin spot on this side of your limb that's no good you want to avoid that so make sure you keep an eye that your tool is even and level and mirroring whatever your limbs doing so if you have a limb that has a little bit of a roll to it you've got to mirror that with your tool because if your limb is tilted just a little bit and you have a flat tool you're going to end up making a thin spot on one side you got to keep things even pay attention so that was 10 pretty heavy strokes on this limb i'm going to flip it around i'm going to do the exact same thing on the other all right so that took a little bit of weight off might be getting close to getting a string on it so i'm going to go ahead and file the nox in here and then we can go ahead and put a loose a very loose tillering string on here and put it up on the tillering rack uh so the main thing you want to watch out for on your knocks is that your shoulders right here where the knot comes out and meets with the back you want to make sure that there's not a sharp edge right there because that'll actually cut your bow string so you want to kind of round that out a little bit don't round it too far into the back but just kind of round those off kind of this way all right so i've got both knocks cut in now i'm just going to go ahead and put a long string on this thing we're going to go over here to the the tillering rack i'll show you how i've got that constructed we'll just stick this thing up there pull on it a little bit and just see how it bends all right so the tillering setup that i've got here is very nice i prefer this type of setup i've got a cradle on the wall here about head high and then down here at the bottom i've got a pulley i've got a rope running through that and so what we're gonna do is stick this bow right up here we're gonna put our pulley rope on here now when you have a bow with a bunch of back set like this a lot of times it wants to flip and so you may end up having to stick something in here to kind of brace this thing so that it doesn't flip pull it down enough to get it down under your rack right there and then you're good to go so now what this allows us to do is grab hold to our rope back up here pull it and then we can get a an eye on the bend uh left and right and then side to side from back here all right so to start with the first big thing i see is this limb right here when i pull it down like this this one's straightening out this one still has quite a bit of reflex right in here so i want to make this limb match this one so this is a stiff spot i'm going to go ahead and just take my scraper and take a little bit out of this section of this limb right there and that's going to allow this limb tip to come down just a little bit and match this side doesn't take much probably just a few scrapes all right so this is that stiff section of this limb so i'm just going to turn my draw knife up about a 90 to the limb take about 10 good scrapes off of here round those edges back out just a little bit i'll put it back up here see what that did [Applause] [Applause] probably take another 10 or 15 off of right in here yeah it looks good that looks much more even all right so you notice that i'm i'm doing this incrementally a little bit at a time at this point it's very easy to take a stiff spot and make it into a weak spot if you take too much wood off there you can't put it back on if if this area right here that's was kind of stiff if i uh get impatient and start just hogging off wood i'm gonna make this into a weak spot and the only way to fix that is to remove wood from everywhere else to make it match this weak spot if you leave a weak spot in a bow over time you might get away with it at first but over time each time you s you shoot that boat that place has to work just a little bit harder than everywhere else and eventually it'll weaken and uh could potentially form a crack there break um but it's a it's a situation that you want to try to avoid so in the tillering process the the name of the game here is to take a little bit off put it back up here and check it go back to the the scraper take a little bit more off check it and just move very very slowly like that do not get impatient with this because if you do you're going to end up messing something up and you're going to end up with a 15 or 20 pound bow that's very common with new bowyears is to end up with a bow that's much much lighter than your target draw weight because they do that they they end up making a weak spot and then they have to remove wood from everywhere else to catch it up with that weak spot that's how you get there that's how you get to those 15 or 20 pound bows so go slow take a little bit off check it take a little bit off and check it so we've got this limb pretty well matching this one at this point the bow is still pretty doggone heavy now if you have one or if you're if you plan on making more than just one or two bows i would highly highly highly recommend that you get a scale and put right here between your bow string and your pull rope that's gonna help you to get a feel for how heavy your bow is or how much weight you're putting on your bow i don't have a scale in this because as i said before i'm trying to do this with a very minimal tool kit so i'm just doing this by feel but like i said if you're going to be building more than one or two bows get a scale you can get them from three rivers or i don't know what they cost a fish scale would work just fine so that when you pull on this you can tell how many pounds of pressure you're putting on this bow string so what i'm going to do is take this off here i'm going to take a little bit more off of both limbs since we've got things evenly right even right now i'm going to take them off both limbs the whole thing and then i'm going to just try to reduce the weight a little bit keeping things even from side to side i'll put it back up here and our objective right now is to get these limb tips down to about right here if i can get these limb tips down to about right here without being way high on the weight without being way above my target draw weight then we're gonna be in a position to put a short string on it or to brace this thing and that's when real things really start speeding up then once you get a short string on it and the bow is braced you're just about done so i'm going to take this put it back on the shave horse take a little bit off each side and stick it back up here all right so these nice feathery these kind of papery scrapes that's that's what you're after if you can get scrapes like that you're actually doing something you get little wispy stuff like this that's you're not really doing a whole lot right there so put a little bit of pressure make sure you've got a good sharp scraper and keep track of how many scrapes you do per liter because right now everything's even we want to keep everything even so i'm going to take off maybe 10 scrapes off this one i'll flip it around take off 10 off the other side we'll put it back up there and see what we've got those pigeons up there in love it's looking pretty good we're almost there i think we're still just a wee bit stiff on our left side i can tell that this one right in here is not flattening out quite as much as that so maybe just a little bit maybe three or four more scrapes right in here so it's it's very slight but this limbs just a little bit stiffer you can see that when i pull it down this limb starts to round over just a little bit and this one just kind of straightens out a little bit so i'm going to take a little more off right here and that should bring this limb down to match this one all right so we've got it back up on the tillering rack so here's what i did i took off five scrapes from everything from here to here here to here and then i took off an additional three right in this area to try to get this limb to round out a little bit to match that one so we'll stand back and give it just a little pull and see what we've got bam getting close that is pretty close i think we could probably get a short string on that now right now the bow is pretty even side to side as far as i can tell with the short strip or this long string on there it's kind of hard to tell with a long string but when we shorten this string up and brace this boat if there's any uh imbalance from side to side or any weak spots in the limbs it's really gonna make those things stand out so we're just gonna take this string that i've got here and i've got in the end here i've got just a timber hitch or bowyer's knot some people call it and i'm just going to take this i think i have a video on youtube showing you how to tie this thing if not there should be something on patreon ah yeah we go all right so it should be pretty evident what's going on here this limb is a little bit stronger this limbs a little bit weaker but within these limbs this section right here is going to be your weak spot this right in here is a little bit stiff and same here this is a little bit stiff so what i'm going to do is i'm going to put a little squiggly mark on my weak spots this right here is not quite a weak spot but it would turn into one if i took off more wood i'll mark that too and then for my stiff spots i'll put some long lines this way so that i'll know where to remove the wood and where to leave the wood so at this point go slow take off just a little bit come back and check because if you take off too much at this point and it doesn't take much and i'm talking just two or three scrapes too much you take off too much somewhere you're gonna end up with a sweet spot you're gonna have to chase that and then you're gonna end up with a light bow so i'm gonna go ahead and unstring this and fix this oh man so again just removing wood from the stiff spots so when i'm stringing this thing don't just string it up and look at it you need to stress the limb a little bit so put a little pressure on there and that's looking much better still a little stiff right in here mark that if you look down one good way to figure out if you're on a nice radius or not if you look down the limb you can see that this area right here pretty flat it's bending a little bit right in here it's bending a little bit right here this one's flat take this limb on the other hand got a lot of bend here pretty pretty flat right in here and not a lot here just a little bit of bin here so here's your weak spot see how that doesn't match this radius of the limb it should blend blend nicely into the limb this area right in here still giving me a little trouble but it's not bad not too bad let's see here pull it up put it up here give it a little pull see what she does now when you're when you're pulling these bows on this tillering rack you want to pull it just until you see a problem if you see a problem don't keep wrenching on it don't keep trying to get it down to your draw length if you see a problem go ahead and address that problem and then bring it back up here and start working it down to your draw length so this is 24 26 28 we're trying to get it just past 28. so i'm a little bit stiff right in here so i'm just gonna take a few scrapes off that with my pocket knife still pretty heavy it's probably 70 pounds at 29 right now or more all right so i'm gonna unstring this bow take a few more heavy scrapes off everywhere except this one weak spot try to reduce this weight down a little bit and we'll put it back up on the rack okay so at this point i'm just kind of slowly working these limbs down you don't want to just go ahead and reef it on down to your full draw just kind of work it down slowly give those limbs a chance to settle into their bend so we're about 25 inches now 26 and a half or so about 27. so that's 28 right there all right so we're at 28 inches everything's looking pretty good i'm just going to draw it by hand and just see what it feels like that's probably 60 pounds right now at 29 i'm not drawing it quite to 29. nice all right so now what we're going to do is go ahead and shape the handle up we'll cut our shelf in there we'll sand everything down seal it up and we'll be ready to rock and roll all right so i mentioned earlier that we could flip this thing over uh end over end to give us some more flexibility on what's the top and bottom limb but how do you know how do you know what do you what you want to be the top and what you want to be the bottom so what i do go ahead and stress the bow let it settle into the bin that it's going to take and then i take a look at the measurement from the string to the belly of the bow just outside of the risers and what i'm looking for is a slightly larger gap on the top limb we've got just a very slight more distance on this limb than we do this limb and so this is going to be the top limb that's called positive tiller all right so the handle here you can shape this thing however you want contour to your handle i'm going to show you how i do it but you guys do it however you however you want whatever feels uh the best to you make sure you know what's the top limb what's the bottom first thing i'm going to do is start by just rounding this belly side off of this hand i'm going to take these corners off [Music] now i'm going to come to the back side here round this off a little [Music] it's pretty nice so now what i'm going to do is come right up here to where the top of our handle was when we originally marked it out so that's top here's the bottom bring that all the way around now i like to kind of neck mine down right in here and dish it out so that my hand fits in there really nice so i'm going to take a half round rasp line it up with top of that line all right i like the way that feels now at this point you don't have to cut a shelf in there i like to personally so i'm going to go ahead and show you how to do that but like i said if you don't want to cut a shelf in there skip this step so the top of our line right here i'm just going to take the edge of my farrier's rasp and just go straight down i'm actually going to slope this thing towards the front just a little bit so that when the when you put the arrow on the shelf the balance point is kind of towards the back of the handle just personal preference [Music] all right so i've marked out with my rasp where my shelf is going to go i'm just going to go ahead and take a little pull saw cut down just a little ways maybe a quarter inch or so [Music] [Applause] [Music] now we're going to come back with our chisel and work from here down using that cut that we made as a stop so all right shelf is cut now we may need to make some small adjustments to this once we get the string on there put an arrow on see how it aligns we may need to bring the back in just a little bit or the front but that is pretty much done so i went ahead and put a short string on this thing this is a string that's made for a bow this length i'm going to stick this arrow on there and it lines up good with the shelf we don't have to make any adjustments if it was kicked off one way or the other you just have to take out some out of the front or the back just to make it sit in there pretty well i'm gonna go ahead and tie a knock on there and we will be ready to go shoot this thing now if you don't know how to tie a knock i think i did a video a while back showing you how to do these things maybe it's on patreon i don't remember pretty easy lots of tutorials online not going to worry about a bow square at this point i'm just going to kind of eyeball it looks about right i've got a test kit here with a bunch of different arrows in it everywhere from 40 45 to up to like 80 85 shafts the bows that i make tend to uh need an arrow that's spined a bit higher than the draw weight so i'm going to look for say a 6065 or something like that and that there's one right there that should be fairly close close enough anyway um i did a video if you're interested i did a video on how to select the proper arrows for a boat because the having the bow matched with the arrows or the arrows matched with the bow is very very important i'll link to that in the video somewhere put a little piece of paper there one two three four five six seven eight nine ten yards and we'll see if we can hit that thing first shot hickory self bow step back here and draw it once so you can see what it looks like there's no shelf material on this thing at all normally i'd put velcro or something soft on there all right let's give her give her a whirl not too bad this arrow is under spine for this bow it's going to need a much heavier arrow so i don't know if you could see that or not but the arrow came off and kicked away knock left and if you don't know what i'm talking about there actually did a video not long ago on tuning longbows and recurves it's actually about tuning the arrows to the bow which is very informative if you have any questions on that why the arrows do do that and how to correct it and so this is a 60 65 shaft i'll probably need a oh i don't know 70 75 maybe i'm not getting this thing quite to full draw and if you can if you watch my elbow you can see it's a little bit forward because it's a little bit heavier this bow is probably 60 pounds or so i've been shooting a bow that's a little over 50 i'm going to try to go ahead and wrench it on back this time oh hitting in the same spot every time just need to spend some time with it and get some shelf material on there that'll that'll influence how the the arrows fly as well super harsh just shooting straight off the wood like this now this bow is done now i actually did a video last year or maybe the year before on doing all the finish work the sanding the sealing putting the velcro on the the strike plate and the the shelf and all that stuff so i'm not going to cover that in this video i'll link to that at the end of this one then also in the video description so you can check that out but sucker's done and it shoots good i like it it shoots quick it shoots hard and it shoots a little bit higher than where i'm looking but it wouldn't take me long to get dialed in and uh if i get the opportunity i might take this thing out after hogs this winter all right not too bad just a couple inches above where i'm aiming but uh i hope you guys enjoyed this boat building video i hadn't done one in quite a while but i was writing the article taking pictures so i figured i'd knock a video out at the same time but i like it it's a nice shooting bow it shoots fast it shoots hard and it is shooting a little bit higher than what i'm used to but that's fine spend a little bit of time with this thing and it wouldn't take me long at all to get that dialed in so uh if you like the video go ahead and subscribe and hit that like leave me a comment and i might if i get the opportunity and get this thing dialed in i might do some hog hunting with it this winter so we'll see you guys on the next one

Channel: Clay Hayes

Views: 1,051,810

Keywords: self bow, self bow design, bow building, beginners, step by step, longbow, how to build a self bow, wood bow, hickory, primitive bow, bow and arrow, bow building tools, draw knife, flat bow, recurve bow, Clay Hayes, bow, hickory bow, wooden bow, archery, High performance longbow, Diy longbow, how to make a longbow, DIY bow and arrow, DIY bow making, making a high performance bow, high performance bow building, Diy high performance bow, how to make a self bow

Id: 8CpOJyDZJvE

Length: 89min 6sec (5346 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 30 2021