DIY Fiberglass Bow Build

I never want to trick anybody and I always wanna be as authentic as I possibly can, so I wanna tell you my intentions up front. I'm gonna show you parts of how I built this bow today. And this bow comes from the coolest thing I think we have ever done at Shatterproof Archery. Here's the idea. The bones is our wildly popular reflex-deflex bow. And I had the thought, what if we could make half of it and then send it to you, who like to make bows, and what if I could teach you to make the second half of it? So I've spent the last two months writing an instructional book on how to build this and creating a really in-depth video. So if you want the full video, check it out in the description. It's unlisted. It's an hour and 10 minutes long and it's how to build this bow. As far as my intention goes, the first one is to make you aware that we have this bow for sale, that if you like to build things, you can finish out your own custom fiberglass bow. The second thing is that's only gonna be a few people. So for the rest of you, my intention is that this would be entertaining and that you would enjoy this video. Buying the Bare Bones Kit Bow would support my business. And to support me, I've put together an entire tool list that has affiliate links that shows every single tool I use in this process. So if you see something in this video that you might wanna check out, click on that in the description. It'd be much appreciated. The first thing we wanna do is measure the width of the tip of the limb and mark the center. So seven eighths of an inch will be the middle or the center of the limb width-wise. We're gonna measure 19 inches down the limb. The fiberglass we've included is 19 inches, so you don't even have to use a tape measure for this. Clamp it down and then just write a line. The nice thing about this is this fiberglass is gonna curve easier than a tape measure, so we'll get that 19 inch mark consistent on both sides. One of the big benefits here to laying it out from the center is this is how you can avoid limb twist on a fiberglass bow. And from this angle, you can push it down straight in the middle and then from there, mark your T. With the bones, we do a continuous taper. See, three eighths of an inch, three quarter, one and a half inches, and you can nice, perfectly mark it with this bending straight edge. And now you've got the perfect taper marked off the center line. We've machined in some references for you here, and the references are the same on both sides. So the exact same kit bow, you could build a left-handed or a right-handed bow. If you measure from the top limb and the bottom limb, this is the middle or center of the bow. And then this right here is going to be the arrow rest. I'm just going to use a square. Next, we're gonna cut in the arrow shelf. You'll see our curved line. We're gonna use that as a reference. I'm gonna do two cuts, this direction, and then I'll do one this direction. So we're gonna go in five eighths of an inch. So you'll see here how I angled down the side with the fiberglass, and this is coming up in the middle. Now we've got our shelf, and now we've got the deepest part of the handle. So we'll start on the limbs, and we'll bring it down to our Sharpie line, and then we'll move to the handle after the limbs and bring it down to the bottom of these pockets. The first thing is to reduce the limb width. This tool gives you the belt sander, but you're also gonna get the oscillating spindle sander, which is great for shaping the handle. Larger the belt sander, the better. I've got this belt sander right here, and it would be a great one as well because it's a little bit longer. I can fit most of the limb on it. So this belt sander here is just over 10 inches. Here's another option for those who have tools and wanna speed up the process. You can use a bandsaw. Just make sure you have a carbide blade on there. The other option that surprised me that works out pretty good is actually using the table saw. Be very careful with this method. Wear all the protection you need, but it's a very fast way to reduce the limbs. I've got worst case scenario, 80 grit sandpaper, 10 inch belt. Let's see how long it takes to get one of these sides down to the line. For dust collection, I'm just using my shop vac, and that tends to work really well with this tool. So that's not too bad. It took me three minutes to do one side. I transferred my lines from the belly to the back of the bow, so I can show you how to do it on the table saw. First, I like to anchor my left hand on the front of the table saw as far away from the blade as I can be, and I will keep my hand there the entire time while pushing only with the right hand through. We've removed most of the material, and you'll see I'm almost to the bottom of these pockets. First, we'll measure half an inch down from the tip of the bow. We'll measure an inch and a half down. Draw that line across. Now we can flip the bow to the side. We're gonna connect those lines to establish where the string groove will go. Next, I'm gonna use a chainsaw file, and you're just gonna follow this sharpie line and cut it in the depth of the file. Continue filing down. Now it's smooth, so we can flip to the other side. So I'll start here on the back, hold it steady. Now I'm starting to establish that groove, and then from there, I'm gonna ease the front side down. With both sides of the bow filed in, we wanna connect those two sides on the back of the bow. As you're filing both sides down, if you bend down on the end, you can look down those string grooves and just see which side you need to take more material off of. One of my favorite tools to use for this to finish it off is one of these rolls of sandpaper. It's real nice because you can rip a nice little strip out, and then you can use this to saw it basically back and forth with really high grit to make it super smooth. I like to remove all of this material back here. I'm gonna go back to my fine rasp and keep the sides symmetrical as well. That comes together much freer. Now this is a really functional tempo overlay, but I gotta admit, it's very clunky. A good tool to use here is an orbital sander just to round everything over and clean it up, and then I'll finish by hand sanding. First thing we're gonna do is cut in the sight window. Don't go above five inches on the sight window. If you go above five inches, you'll start to get into the working part of the limb, and we don't want to mess with that. Here I am just finishing my cut down to the exact mark I want for the arrow rest. A chisel works good here to remove that excess material. Just go really soft. That way you don't split into the actual arrow rest. Now I convexed this side, and I convexed the arrow rest this direction. That's gonna help there be as minimal friction as possible when shooting the arrow. With the sight window now completed, we're going to find the deepest part of the handle and mark where that's gonna be. We'll measure from the back of the bow because that's gonna be a consistent reference. We'll come in 1 1⁄2 inches, and that's gonna be the deepest part of the throat of the handle. I'm just creating a general reference here so I know where to sand out the material. If you don't have a drill press, we can go ahead and start sanding here, but if you've got a hand drill like this guy, what you can do is just put one hole right above your 1 1⁄2 inch mark, and then when you're on the sander, you'll be able to hit that hole and know that you're at the depth you want to be. This is getting really exciting because today we're gonna shoot this bow. I'm gonna stop there and move on to the tillering so that we can shoot the bow, and after we shoot it, then we can make the final last 10 to 15% tweaks that we need, and when we make those tweaks, we'll do our final sanding on the tip overlays, but for now, let's move on to the tiller. There's a couple different methods to string it. You could use a bow stringer, or my favorite method because of speed. I'm gonna wrap that around my right leg. I'm gonna put my thigh in the middle of the handle, and then I'm gonna bend it evenly on both sides, and that is a nice, easy way to string it. The tip to that is to not stick the tip overlay on the ground. If you do that, the tip overlay can break, so keep this side off the ground. Look how good that looks right off the bat. We're already good to go back to full draw. What we're going for is a positive tiller by quarter of an inch, and right now on the bottom, we're at 7 1⁄4, and on the top, we're at 7 1⁄4. Cover the entire limb of the fiberglass with a Sharpie, and that Sharpie is going to be your reference, so all I need to do is sand off this Sharpie line. So you wanna exercise it probably 30 times to full draw. You can even hold it if you want to. This bow feels a little heavy, around 50 pounds, and we're gonna tiller off of how it feels when you shoot. When measuring tiller, I measure to the inside of the bow string, 5 1⁄16, and 1⁄8 plus, so perfect. If I did my math right, we're 3 1⁄16 positive tiller right now. All right, let's send an arrow downrange. Guys, this bow's already shooting so good. The other thing that may not be on is the poundage, so let's check that now. All right, I've moved over to the warehouse now just so that I can test out the poundage here. You can test it with one of those poundages where you can just draw back. Let's see where we're at at 28 inches. So we're 52 at 28. Let's see what we're looking at at just over 29, so 56. For me, a 56-pound bow is just a little bit heavy. We have a great shooting bow, but our poundage isn't where we want it. So to reduce the poundage, we've got a couple of options. One is the limb width, and two is the limb thickness. I will check my tiller, make sure I'm good still. Got a 1⁄4-inch positive tiller, so I'll shoot it in a bit to make sure everything checks out. Let's check the poundage, see if we're close to that 50 mark for me. 51, I'm gonna leave it there since I want finished at 50 and final sanding, and shooting it for the first 500 shots, I'll probably lose that initial pound. All right, we're looking really good. Think about the handle while you're shooting it a couple times. Make sure all those curves are how you like it before you start the final sanding. We have now got a perfectly functioning bow, but we're not done yet because now it's time to add a little bit of sauce, a little bit of spice. It's the weekend, so I'm hijacking our production setup real quick to show you a couple tools that are useful. If you've got them, they're definitely not necessary for one bow, but one tool specifically I really enjoy using. You want it low enough it doesn't burn, but using this to clean up an area can save you a lot and a lot of time. The other really good method is grab some higher grit sandpaper. And actually, before finishing, we can write on the bow. If you wanna write your poundage or signature, a paint marker works out really good. Also, some white India ink with a fountain pen also works great, and you can write on the bow whatever you would like. This is our spray booth behind me. This is what we use for our custom bows. The process we use in the spray booth is not what I'm gonna do for this bow. So in here, we're gonna use a shellac, and then we're gonna use our HLVP sprayer to do this water-based finish right here. We'll do probably about two to three coats of the shellac and three to four of this, so we end up around six coats of finish for the custom bows. We got a custom heat stamp for our Bones bow that was quite a bit too small, so we've never used it. Eh, that's not bad. It'll work. Yeah, you can read that, can't you? Yeah. And now I'm just gonna do my signature. Oh, yeah. That looks so much good. It's a good recommendation to vent out the area and wear a mask. You wanna keep moving and let go of the trigger while you're moving. So if I spray in the open area, you don't wanna stop and then let go of the trigger. You wanna let go of the trigger and keep moving past it, and that'll keep from getting any drips. All right, we can do this for real now, baby. I haven't put a shelf on it yet, but I just wanna shoot it. So let's take a few more shots. Ooh, that flew good. My current plan is to take this one to oak hunting this year. Wow. For the full in-depth explanation of how to build this, check out that video in the description. This video right here you just watched was 15 minutes shorter than that one. Thank you so much for watching today. Subscribe if you haven't already, and I'll see you on the next video. Stay shadowproof, my friends.