MAKING A *HOMEMADE BOW*

The challenge for us today is to make a wooden bow that outperforms a store-bought bow. So you guys know Garrett from Road4TV. He is just venturing into traditional archery for the very first time and he recently bought a bow so he could start practicing. Now his bow is a 62-inch long bow at a 45-pound draw weight. This bow shoots 145 to 165 feet per second depending on the weight of his arrow. Now I'm going to try to make a bow for him that outperforms his bow. Now the chances of me doing this are kind of slim since I do not have hardly any experience with any store-bought bows. I only have experience with the bows I've made. Plus on top of that the bow I'm making Garrett is a little different design than I've ever made before. Most of the bows I've made are just like this one. Before we get into the design I gotta tell you why this matters. It matters because if the timing is off on the bow the bow will shoot poorly. This can happen with compound bows and you might have heard of this where the cams do not rotate and sink together and when they don't rotate simultaneously then there's going to be a lot of hand shock and the arrow is not going to fly straight for you and it's going to be really hard to tune your bow because when you draw a bow back to shoot and release that arrow both limbs are swinging forward at the same time. Now what you want is them to snap and then come back at the same time like a spring. If the limbs are not in sync together your hand will vibrate a ton and it will not be comfortable to shoot. So our goal is to get both limbs to sling forward at the same time. This should work really really well. The only problem is I haven't done it yet. Put your thinking cap on and stick with me for a second because this is very important. In order to have both limbs sling forward at the same time you would think you would need both limbs to be equidistant. That is not necessarily true. On this bow right here I have the center of the bow in the middle of the handle. The arrow rest is above the center which means I need to make the top limb bend a little more and this is how I've made most my bows in the past but with Garrett's bow it's different. I've got the arrow rest in the very center of the entire bow hoping that this will make the bow shoot even sweeter. I've got equal distance on either side here which causes for a small handle in this case. The reason I chose this layout is not because I wanted to but because I kind of had to because there's a big split through the wood that I had to work out. With this kind of a design the arrow knocking point is going to be in the very center of the string. This will hopefully optimize this bow's performance. As you can see I went ahead and started without you so let me run through what I've done. On the limb tips I decided to make them non-bending and reflexed back a little bit. I'm going to leave them thick so that they don't bend but I'm going to thin them out on the side so that we can get a fast flying bow. The handle section is very small which means I got more working limb which hopefully will lead to a faster shooting bow. The downside is it might be more difficult to get the handle comfortable and we'll just have to wait and see to see if there's any hand shock when we shoot the bow. Alrighty so that's enough talk so let's get to finishing this bow. So far this bow is coming along really really well. I've got it all the way to about 30 inch draw length and I was just working on that tiller. There's a spot in the middle that's thinner than the rest so I've been trying to get the bow to bend evenly and I finally did and boom got it to full draw and then I checked the draw weight. 35 pounds. So if I don't tell Garrett I don't think he'll ever notice and that's what I was planning to do until I thought to myself and heard his voice in my head. Dang gum creamer you know I'm stronger than that. Yeah I gotta do something about this. So two ways I can strengthen the poundage of this bow. One is you can add a bow backing so I could add like that fiberglass or I could add like sinew but I don't really have time for that. Second option would be to reflex or recurve the limbs even more. That'll add a couple pounds of poundage but I don't really want to do that. He was looking for a long bow or a reflex bow so the third option I've got is to shorten the tips. If I make the bow shorter it should be stronger so that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna take one and a half or so inches off of each limb tip. This is a 62 and a half 63 inch bow at the moment right now which is a little bit long for hunting or for what I would like to hunt with and I know Garrett's gonna be hunting with this bow so I want to make it as easy as possible for him to move around in a blind with it or move around in a tree stand so making it shorter will help with that too. Plus I can get it up to the strength that Garrett has. So that is our next steps on this process and like I always say when in doubt get back to work. And we will do the final reveal of the bow on the next video. Thank you to everybody who has subscribed to this YouTube channel. Here we make bows, we make anything that has to do with traditional archery and we're going to take all of this put it together we're going to go hunting and show that you can be successful with tools and weapons you make yourself. So if you haven't done so already and you want to see more of this kind of video go ahead and subscribe and thank you guys for joining me as always we'll see you on the next one.