Making a Yew Maruki Longbow Part 2 - The Sapwood

Hello there and welcome back to this Japanese longbow build. My name is Seth, this is Sweet Chariot. Let's do this. We've got ourselves a lovely stave. Well, hello and welcome first. New subscribers, OG subscribers, good to see you all. I've been making short work of this in an attempt to heal my wounds after breaking an ash longbow I was making. This one may well break as well. We are trying to take a log and turn it into a bow and there's no real guarantee. You can only keep trying, keep learning and get better at it. So let's go ahead and do that. Why not? We're done. I've skinnied this all down. I've taken it down to the width that it needs to be, the slimmest point that the original split gave us, which I'm pretty sure, where's the handle? No, skinniest point was down here. So I've thinned down the rest of the stave down that way, bring it in line more or less with this limb here. Asymmetrical longbow, Japanese longbow, so we're going to be holding it about here. This is going to be a dinky little limb, this will be a big limb and the taper is really gentle on these. Well, you can make it in all different sort of ways, but what I'm trying to emulate is the bamboo composite maruki, no not maruki, iyumi. This is a maruki, an iyumi is a composite bow. The maruki is a self-bow version of that. You don't know the difference between a composite bow and a self-bow. Welcome to the learning journey. This was something I only discovered a couple of years ago myself, not into archery, but I have taken up woodwork and I have learned archery as a result. Right, this video though, this video we are going to attack the sapwood because I want to get this bow bending. It's not a massive split, it was something like this when it started, a little bit smaller. So it hasn't had much material taken away for it to get to this point, part of the reason why I started it. It's maybe not the best div I've got, but it's one of the quicker ones. Now, we can start taking away this sapwood. We've got the tip measure over here, doesn't matter the exact width. We've got about quarter, quarter of an inch, maybe a little bit more to get rid of all, well, a quarter of an inch of sapwood. We want to leave probably about that much. I'm going to say this is a centimetre, probably want to leave about a mil of sapwood. Thereabouts, maybe a little bit more. I could take a pencil and draw down here. I'm not going to, I'm going to use my eye and rough it down like I have done the belly as well. Let's begin. Thank you for joining me. This was quite satisfying. I did its first little bend earlier and the bark just started to crack off. You see, if we had the perfect amount of sapwood left, so we just had, you know, cut away my heartwood and we already had just a real thin layer of sapwood there, I'd want to be really careful about taking away the bark. You could leave the cadmium layer behind as a, there's a bit of camouflage sort of back into it, but we have got quite a lot of sapwood to go. So I'm not going to be precious with the bark. Something you can do is flip your draw knife upside down and that's really good at lifting the bark off without damaging the layers underneath. Maybe should have done that with the ash bow that I just broke. It would have given us a more even layer of cadmium over the back, which I think is quite important for an ash bow. It will be important in my next ash bow, I'd say that much. Cool. Right. So I'm going to go in with my blade and start whipping away until it's all white. It's back. Here it is. I'm going to take away all of the necessary sapwood in this video. That would be, that'd be nice. That'd be a complete stage. We don't want to rush, but we do want to get it done. I hope we all well. It's a beautiful spring in England. We were about to get a whole bunch of rain though, I think. We're getting a, a Met Office warning. The last sort of two, three weeks have been sensational. Beautifully sunny, warm, up around 20 degrees. All the blossom on the trees, staying put. It hasn't been knocked off by rain or wind. It's been gorgeous. All the bluebells are out. Bit of short of that yesterday. The country is beautiful, aside from its underlying dark issues that are going on. You take yourself out into the countryside, everything starts to make sense again. Yesterday I felt it had been a little while, so I went out for a real nice time in the forest, ran a stream, letting the dog run around, fetch a stick. It was very peaceful, calming. Start off with the tip here. It gives us a good lead into the rest of the limb, so we don't take too much away. This is only a small log this came from. I'm going to have to be careful of that crown as well. So I'm going to round it off very slightly on the back. Once we've done that, we should have an idea of exactly where it snakes. A couple of concerns on this stave. We've got a knot right here, we've got a big knot down that end. They are both, oh yeah, and then this one, this little one here. I'm hoping, this is the rubbish thing, a beautiful thing with self bows, I'm hoping that'll be okay. I'm mindful. You can work around the knots and the wood will bend. Bend around them. You can see this cadmium stuff on you is extremely gummy. Clags on the blade here. Something's really bad. You've got to scrape it off. I particularly want to use my chisel. Use my scissors. Get off of there. You have to do that again a few times before we're done here. I really wish I hadn't broken that ash longbow. I feel like an idiot. It was twisty. Twisty in a way that I should have cured from the very start. I didn't see it. Get a heartwood come through here. This bit can be tricky because obviously you can't see where the heartwood is. Follow the lines you created with tidying up the belly. Don't go too deep all in one go. Sculpt your way down. Thank you for dropping in if there is anyone watching. There's an endless amount of content to choose from and thank you for choosing mine. If you haven't noticed, on these media platforms you can... Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's good. It's very frustrating to flick through YouTube shorts and see some of the stuff that has a million likes, a million views, two million views, ten million views. Like what you like. The world needs our help. We're flicking and liking pointless shit. There's a wealth of knowledge going to waste and there's AI coming to existence which might replace us. I don't know. Make yourself useful. The way I see it is we need to nurture the skills that keep us alive and this is a big one. So I just get weaponry, right? All these hunting equipment is extremely highly engineered. Do you know how to rifle a rifle barrel? I don't. And on top of that it's all told that lead is poison in the environment. Oh no, you can't have hunting because of lead, you see. It's not because it's free food. Free nutritious food that keeps you in touch with the environment, keeps you healthy without the involvement of large corporations. Nothing to do with that. So we match that game. All right, we can't use rifles. Well, we better get back into archery then. And then, I don't think there's a... I hope there's not a nefarious sort of aim behind it, but bowhunting in the UK is forbidden. Not allowed to do it. We are allowed to let deer roam wild and destroy our forests, unchecked, without any natural predators. But no, we can't bowhunt. Clicking across the video the other day, a fellow who seemed to be getting involved in the efforts to make that not the case anymore, try and bring the bowhunting back in the UK. It sort of goes like this. If you care about the forest, and you should, especially we're being told about carbon being such a big problem. Trees eat carbon, so we should very much care about the forest. Not only for its carbon eating abilities, but its habitat and its ability to stop flooding. We should care about the forest. So, if we care about the forest and the way the world is going, we need to spend our time hunting deer. I could do the breakdown for you, but that is more or less what we need to do. No, what you're going to get told is...