Making a Turkish Inspired PVC Bow Full Build - 105 # Heavy Bow

hey fellow backyard Boyers Nick here so here's the 100 lb Turkish style inspired bow I'm starting off with a piece of 1in schedule 40 PVC pipe this is black furniture grade pipe I'm using this because of the added UV resistance and impact resistance the dimensions we're making this bow are pretty close to the upper limits of what PVC does well at and so this is kind of pushing it for normal plumbing pipe you can do it especially if the pipe is flexible and as long as everything's balanced and it's taken care of it will work well but these heavy heavyweight bows you do need to be a little more gentle in how you store them and care for them I've cut this pipe down to 47 in overall I've marked the center at 23 1/2 in then I've marked 2 in out from Center on either side and then 2 in out from those so 4 in out from Center and then on my limbs I've got some marks from the end I have a mark That's 3 in and then one that's 6 in from the end then a mark That's 6 inch from this one and a mark That's 6 in from this one so I have two limb marks that are 6 in I've got the handle section which is 8 in in total and then the end has a 6-in section that's split into two so now we're going to use my heat gun to heat up this pipe until it's soft enough to where I can press this down and the walls will touch just with finger pressure should be able to do this all the way down the length and then I'm going to use my flattening jig then I'm going to use my flattening jig to set the taper I've set this to an inch and a qu which is almost the full diameter of the 1in pipe so that's going to set our Center and then we're going to press till the ends are closed the center right there and so sometimes if these aren't setting there may be a spot somewhere that's not quite warm enough you can heat the side of the jig while the bow is clamped in there just lightly if it doesn't go though don't heat it too much or the sides could split I'm just going to let this cool down then we'll flip it over and do the other side all right now that it feels cool take this off okay so now I'm just going to flex the limb so you can take a look at this you can see there's a little bit of a Bend to it I'm going to straighten this up really quick and then flatten the other side all right there it is so that looks good I'm going to heat this side up and flatten that out that's pretty good just a little bit of adjustment here that looks good you can see that on this top part it's more rounded and on this bottom side it's more flat so this will be nice because this will simulate the look of a strip of horn on the belly side plus the bone splices in a traditional handle so now that the limb is straight it's time to shape the handle so here's the center of the pipe I'm going to be heating between these two handle marks so this 4 in section it's going to get heated up and roughly an inch beyond that you want to come right up to each Edge so a little bit more than this is going to get heated but it's mainly this section that's going to get [Music] shaped so I'm going to press this flat against my board and right here at the 4 in section is going to be pressed perpendicular to the rest of the bow so now I'm going to line up on both limbs to make sure that this portion is straight as you can see my fingers have left some marks so I'm going to heat this up again just to remove the finger marks since this is going to be a heavyweight bow I'm going to keep the handle thick it's not going to be very narrow on this one but it needs more body it's got a lot going on so now that the handle is done and let that cool and then we're going to start working on the limbs so now I'm going to start working on the tips so this is going to be a compound tip this portion here is going to be folded backwards to make the very end kind of like a sea but unlike a sea this is just going to be one piece part of the bow it's not added on and then the second portion is going to get heated up and puffed out slightly so this part's going to be done first then we'll work on this and then we'll work on the rest of the limb there we go e so you can see this thickened area here is allowing us to get more of an angle we don't need a very hard okay so you can see that this thickened area that we made allows us to get more of an angle other was this front edge might collapse you don't want to put too much of a Bend here okay now these tips may not look historical but these are the strongest tips I know of so far for PVC bows and this bow is going to need them that looks good okay yes it's not now I'm going to heat this portion here I've already done some of this now we're going to heat this up again and drive as much of this forward and that will make this stand out a little bit more and we'll be able to flex It Forward um there'll be more material in here to take tension and we'll smooth this out to further the illusion of corn being inserted up to about here along the belly side all right so now that that's heated place this flat bring this up and then press with my hands to flatten it out on the belly side and press in this first part of this compound recur very cool tips okay so that's the first portion don't want to make these creases too hard that looks good make sure lines up with the rest of the bow it's looking good so far so now this section here is the primary reflex so I'm going to heat this portion up and it is going to curve upward like this so it's heating up over here it's starting to thicken you don't want it too thick here we still need this to flex further out we don't want it all to flex in the handle we'll add a reflex here we want to make sure that this whole 6in section gets some reflex to it so that the string will definitely rest here this will serve almost as an integral string Bridge and then should come right off of the limbs with the rest of the curve follow up here so just a little more reflex right in here all right so for ease of lining everything up I'm going to go ahead and do this on the other Limb and then we'll do the deflex at the same time so it'll be a little bit easier to get everything balanced and in case you want to you can pause the video and hold your bow up to mine to get an idea of the angle of this tip you can see that the tip sits about 4 in in front of the beginning of the curve so it's got about 4 in of reflex e e for all right so here's the whole bow and frame so I've got both tips done now you have two options at this point if you want a bow that is slightly faster slightly heavier um but requires some balancing and will be a little finicky at least Leed it first then you can just go ahead make sure everything is straight and then string the bow up just going to have to train the limbs because one side will pull a lot harder than the other you have to pull on the other side um it's not a very complicated process it's pretty intuitive uh for this bow since it's so heavy I'm going to add some deflex not a whole lot just to bring these tip back slightly you don't want to see any big divots when you're looking down the bow like this the light should be nice and smooth these are okay but if it's anything deep it could cause a collapse so this curve is going to cause a lot of the bend to concentrate around here it'll Force these tips to come toward each other as opposed toward the Archer it's a really nice design so now I'm going to cut the nox I'm using a carbide file about 3/4 of an inch away from the end now that the kns are cut on both sides let's string the bow up see how it does all right so now we're going to string this up for the first time I have tied a paracord string I made it about 8 in shorter than the knock to knock length see how it goes and that is not not going to work let's try this way I believe okay there we go that is looking good so I can't tell right now which side's bending more I think it might be this l and power cord creats okay I think this bow might be slightly beyond my normal capacity I am going to have to practice for the shooting video Let's see okay all right let's go what's it at uh I think you're what's like 110 almost okay 110 you're at 100 right there okay cool that was wonderful nice I took a scouring pad and cleaned off the entire surface of the bow so now it's a nice matte finish and I I went ahead and cleaned up the knocks and the tips so now I'm going to be applying some adhesive vinyl this is car interior vinyl by Vivid I picked this up on Amazon and we're going to apply it to the back of the bow and then heat it up with a heat gun press it down I went ahead and cut two strips of vinyl and they are each long enough to go from the handle of the bow to right to the base of this tip now this is a lot easier than trying to use one single piece because we'll wrap this handle with a different piece of vinyl and that will give it a nice finished look so I'm wiping the back of the bow down with alcohol to remove any waxes or oils that might keep it from adhering going to start right in the center of the handle try to keep this as level as possible I keep it taut about I just keep pulling tight keep it in the middle so now I'm just going to use my thumb and press out any air bubbles going from the center outward for for e now I'm just using a needle to pop any air bubbles or spots where the vinyl has not fully adhered here's the second now we're going to wrap the handle now for the handle I'm going to use a different type of vinyl this is cloth that's been attached to a pretty nice vinyl material and then it has an adhesive backing now the adhesive backing is not very strong on this one it will come right off but I'm going to use the adhesive so that it stays in place cuz one of the things is that if you make a handle wrap like this and it doesn't somehow have a way to stay adhere to the bow it can shift and move over time which can be frustrating in something like a bow where you want consistent hand placement I'm going to cut both of these sides a lot longer than I need it's better to cut a little bit than to not have enough fold it try to hold it and I do that with the bottom okay now remove the backing a little bit so I can put this down this will give a nice Edge to the top and bottom of our handle put the backer back on there's that side so I take the piece of viny place it in the center on one side and then wrap it around now I'm just going to Mark a line going down the center of the handle and it's nice to do that because you can see how these ends end up flaring up a little bit it's because when you do that it takes account of the added thickness here so you don't end up with a top and a bottom that are just too small to fit now that that side's nice and even take the part I had underneath and place it on top just press on together and then again fingernail run the line but now I've got the existing other piece to follow so I'm following along the other side now pull this up trim it so I've got a sharpened needle I'm going to go about an eighth of an inch in from the edge and just poke a hole so let's go half an inch be a nice big crisscross half an inch down about an eighth of an inch away you can measure this or you can just eyeball it it's up to you one more right there I'll flip it around and I'll match all of these on this side all right I'm going to use some artificial senu I think this color matches the bow fairly nicely so we'll go with this so I like starting one down from the end go in on one side out the other with this vinyl cloth you don't want to pull too hard because you can rip it so when you're going to fold it over just want to make sure everything's in place and this will go up here bring that under to the other side pull it through for for it's for for for for there you go okay that looks good so now I'm just going to trim these ends and burn them down there it is I think it came out really nice so today we're going to be making a string for this bow it'll have padded Knocks to give a little bit of extra protection because this is such a heavy bow once we get the string finished we can start doing some speed testing and seeing how this thing shoots so let's get started so this is a really strong knock it's got four layers of PVC in it but still we're going to Pat it so it's even more durable so for this string I'm using artificial senu this is polyester and it has a breaking strength of about 100 lb I'm going to be using eight strands of this total to make my main string and my Loops are going to get about 16 strands so I start by taking a measurement of the bow from knock to knock so since this Loop is a little longer I'm going to add one two three four to this measurement and and then I'm going to make two bundles of four strands so now I've got my two bundles of four and I've waxed them with a little bit of bow string wax so they'll hold together before I start my first Loop I'm going to measure out one two three and then I'm going to make two bundles of eight strands I've gone ahead and made four bundles of four for these I'm going to be using two for the first Loop and these two are for the second Loop so put those on the side so now I'm going to take my end here and measure out one of these for the end and then for my Loop then for my loop I want them to be a little shorter than these paracord Loops but because you lose a little bit of material I'm going to start them off the same and I'm going to give myself about 2 more Ines just because this is very thick material so now I'm going to find the center of this this is going to be the material for the loop I folded my two bundles in half and then I'm going to place them together at this point I'm going to go down here to start my Loop so now you're going to have two bundles in each hand and one side's going to have a short bundle and a long bundle and the other side's going to have a short bundle and a long bundle go together all right so now I'm going to take one side and twist the two counterclockwise until they start to twist on themselves do that to the other side then I bring them both together and twist them in the opposite direction so clockwise you can get about two twists before I have to retwist them counterclockwise clockwise I'm going to continue doing that down till the loop is finished all right so now I want to separate my two bottom bundles these two on the top place the ends together like this this end I'm going to twist clockwise so this way which is opposite of what we were doing do that until it twists and we're going to do that this one do that until it wants to twist onto itself and put them both together pull them tight so the ends are even and then twist them both together as far as they'll go okay now I'm going to do the same this side so now I twist it counterclockwise counterclockwise clockwise and just continue that until this Loop is completely closed so now I take my two longer strands and make sure I don't cut these and then I'm just going to cut these other strands at different lengths to help taper the end just a little bit so now just keep twisting all of this together into the end and then continue twisting for about an inch beyond that so then I trim off all of these loose ends and there's the first Loop now I take each Strand and I put about 4 40 counterclockwise twists into it so the same direction we've been doing our main cord with so I'm going to do 40 twists on this one and then 40 twists on this one so once they're together put a little bit of twist into the string and there we go so here's the first Loop all finished so now bring the loop over to see where I should start the loop to get about the same loop size so let's see so the loops start there so I'm going to start my Loop right here just like the other side make sure that the bundles are separate and that there's one extra bundle on each one of the main string bundles once they put together counterclockwise counterclockwise clockwise and then I'm just going to keep going until the loop is finished all right so now that the loop is done I'm going to make sure that it is the right size they're both the same size so now I'm going to start down here take these two and I'm going to twist them clockwise these two separate the center two strands clockwise together and then counterclockwise so now that I'm getting close to the end going to trim so this is more of a taper just make sure not to trim the main piece of cord okay so now I go back to the original Loop and I go from here and I just push all the way to the other side this helps equal out all of the twists pull both together tight and then allow them to twist back together again there's the string now one end goes on the top knock the other end goes on the bottom so here's the bow strung up you can see the the brace Height's a little taller than it originally was I'm going to take both ends of the bow and just pull it toward me this is to get all of the string stretch out quickly all right so now that all the stretch is out of it it's back down to about 7 and 1/2 in so there it is that's looking good that's another thing too paracord strings tend to be a little creaky on PVC bows this is nice and silent so now I'm going to serve this string so here's the top Lim of the bow where the Bow's going to be shot about 2 in up from that right right here once I get a couple of wraps I can tighten this up get it to where I'd like it to be right there so now it's on here I can just sort of spin this go for about an inch and I pull this loose end as tight as I can then pull it back down this way and then continue serving so I'm going to pull out some extra string bring the spool over my finger and then I'm going to tuck the spool back underneath pull that a little extra and I'm going to tuck the spool underneath and going in the same direction but so now I'm going that way but this way instead of that way it's basically going almost in the reverse of what I was doing and I'm going to lay down about 3/4 of an inch of wrap so you can see how I have about 3/4 of an inch wrapped down there now I take this out Bring it under this thread then Wrap This Thread over and as I wrap onto this side the cord comes off of this side so I'm able to move the wraps from here to here okay so now we going to hold this tight and pull this in if I just let go there's enough twist in here that it will get caught so I'm going to hold it at an angle and then pull hard there you go so now that I've cut the ends just burn the end with a lighter to keep this from freeing and today I'm going to be doing my first shots with this bow I only have one arrow that is spined enough or stiff enough for this bat uh this is made out of a driveway marker solid fiberglass and weighs about 1,000 grains for [Music] about as close to a full draw I've got so far probably about 26 to 27 Ines so I'll keep working on it and keep you guys posted so I've been working on drawing the 105 lb bow and I've needed to take a little bit of a break because I've don't want to injure myself and I don't want to get hurt so today we're going to be making a device that will allow me to shoot this bow uh without putting any strain on myself so I'm going to take this tillering stick I have and this is something that I have for making bows place the bow on this side and then you can draw it back to whatever distance you want it's marked so that you can test to see how the limbs are bending at any given length this side has Nails on it so that you can hook the string at different length so you can stand back and take a look and see how it is and with wooden bows you can even do work on the tiller so today I'm going to be taking this and just figuring out a way to attach the bat B to it and a trigger mechanism so that this can be shot either this way so we can do the speed testing or holding the bow like this so there it is let's get started so since I'm kind of changing how I'm going to be using this tiller I'm going to take all of these nails off so they don't get in the way now if you don't have a tillering stick or a tillering tree like this I made this out of a piece of 2x two Lumber this was cut to I believe 4T long though as long as it's a little bit more about 4 in longer than the draw length you want then it'll be all right so from here to this point here is 28 in so this is where we're going to be putting our trigger for this so we could actually cut all of this off but I think I'm going to leave this on for right now this 28 in Mark represents a 28 in arrow that sits at about this point wherever that lands where your bow whether your bow is sitting here with a narrow handle or it has a longer more modern style handle it doesn't really matter it's just sort of this arbitrary length that way I can keep all of my bows more or less standardized but this is what I'm working with now I'm going to make a trigger so now I'm going to drill with a 7/16 in drill bit right above 28 in about a/4 inch above it so I've gone ahead and driven this Arrow shaft into the hole this is a broken arrow so I'm using this otherwise you'd want a dowel that will fit in the hole you drilled that's snug um I put a little bit of glue and just glued it in place and we're going to be cutting here and then cutting the bottom flush and this is where the string will rest then we'll put our trigger out here so that's the hole that we just drilled now up here at the 6in mark on the side of this area we're going to drill another hole of the same size so that a dowel can be placed in here so that the dowel and the bow can be wrapped together to hold the bow onto the tiller all right so I drive it in till there's about a half an inch sticking out of the one side I'm going to trim this side to half an inch all right so I've gone ahead and flattened out a 4 and 1/2 in piece of PVC pipe this is half inch PVC and this is going to be going right here to form the trigger so to figure out the layout for my trigger and then I'm going to drill an E8 inch hole right here about a little more than a/4 inch in from the edge and right here in the middle of the sport all right so now that I've okay so I've gone ahead and just stuck this on here slightly with the nail I'm going to cut all of this out smooth it up and then we'll see if it works here it is now I'm going to attach it so now I'm going to hammer this nail in place [Music] I'm bring this back to 28 in hook it on there all right so I've gone ahead and heated this tab and pushed it over so you can see when the string is sitting right on here and angling that way now the trigger is right below where the string is going to be so it can be pushed up and over so as you can see I've made some modifications to this I changed the shape of this pin so that the string sits a little more securely on this side and there's more of a rounded lip right here that way the string can more easily roll off of this but it won't easily roll off of this now there's no safety to this or anything like that so this isn't like a crossbow where it can be loaded and carried around this is more of a set it up to shoot load it and then pull the trigger immediately all right so I've gone ahead and attached the 105 lb bow and see if I can get this on here and uh shoot this successful let's get shot there now woo there we go so here it is I hope you enjoyed building this along with me today and next time we'll be shooting this now I'll be able to do some speed testing this is nice to be able to shoot this thing at full draw man that was a bit of a struggle I might end up changing this pin making it a little more robust but it worked so I'll continue to test this out and we'll see what it is but for now here it is I'm happy with it especially for anything under 100 lb definitely this would be an easy thing to set up before I go thank you to everyone who's helping support the channel I have links in the description to patreon my books on Amazon and the store on Teespring if you'd like to help the channel out you can go and check those out and your support really helps keep me doing what I love doing so thank you so much and I'll see you guys next time bye