Building a PRIMITIVE BOW from a TREE - Start to Finish Survival Bow

In this video, I'm going to show you my method for carving a bow with minimal tools. Bows like this are powerful, fast, they're really fun to make, and they can last a lifetime if cared for. They also only take a day or two to carve out. So let's get into it. Let's get some more mushrooms. All right. Here's our stave. It's got a little bit of bending to it. It's straight enough to work just fine though. And what I've noticed is there are two flat sides of this. So the cross section of this is kind of an oval. We want to use either of those flat sides for the back of the bow. That way it doesn't have a high crown. When a bow has a narrow, high crown, meaning the back of it is kind of raised, then that increases the amount of stress on the outer growth rings. We want to minimize that so we have a long-lived bow. With any luck, this bow will turn out well and I'll be able to hunt with it, and then after the season, I'll back it with sinew, make sure it's really long-lasting. That'll give me a chance to add some recurve to it if I want to. But the point we're going to get it at right now is going to be more than sufficient for taking deer. I'm hoping for a draw weight around 50 pounds, maybe upwards of 60 pounds. That'd be great. And for now, it's just going to be a straight bow. But in the future, if I can do some rawhide backing, I'll definitely give it a bit of a gradual recurve, probably throughout the entire thing. And with an all-natural bow, that can be really helpful. I tend to just use rawhide strings with my bows, which are historically accurate and easy to procure in the wild, especially if you can trap squirrels. Squirrels have really strong skin. If you cut their skin in a spiral fashion, unravel it, and then twine a couple pieces of it together, you can get about six feet of cord. It takes two or three squirrels to do, but in a place abundant with squirrels, especially with how noisy squirrels are, that can be one of the easiest ways to get a long-lasting bowstring for nature. Now, the issue with rawhide is it tends to shrink and expand over time. Even if you stretch out the string beforehand, let it dry that way, you've gotten all the stretch out of it you can, it's going to absorb moisture from the air and relax a bit. And then when you go to string it up, it's going to have stretch to it, and that stretch actually slows down the bow, makes it just a little bit more sluggish. You can lose five or ten feet per second on your arrows that way. Just taking a look at this. There are less knots on one side than the other. Down here I've got a pretty big knot, I've got some small knots on this side, but overall I'll be able to use more of the stave by using this flat side of the bow. I don't want to turn it 90 degrees and use this side as the back of the bow because this is just too high crowned. This side is much flatter, so that's preferable. So we'll turn this around, start chopping this side, carve out the belly. I can remove quite a bit of material. Start with pretty aggressive chops. Once I work my way up the bow, about halfway, then I'll start taking much bigger, shallower angle chops, and that'll split out everything. We do those initial chops because that kind of sets the depth. That way when you split out bigger pieces, those chops guide the split towards the outside, not the inside. Now keep your tools sharp when doing this. You want a sharp tomahawk that's going to carve easily through this hard seasoned wood. The Rocky Mountain Maple is harder than you think. It's one of the harder species of maple, and it makes a really fast, snappy bow. It's a super underrated bow wood, one of the best in the western states. I have to find a better place, somewhere with a stump I can brace this on. I usually wouldn't film just finding a new chopping location, but I wanted to say I'm really excited for all the snow flurries we're getting. If we get a thin layer of snowfall tonight, it's going to be really great for the trap line I'm setting. Setting out to trap some coyotes in a nearby opening in the forest. I have a martin trap line set out already. It's had no action. I don't know how many martin are actually in these woods. Pretty rotten. Still a better platform than the soil. Now in general, if you choke up on the axe like this, you're going to have much more controlled cuts. You're going to have a lot less power, so this is great for finishing work. If you want a lot of power, you go down to the bottom of the handle, but that's going to give you a little bit less control. That's okay for your big chopping cuts that are removing the bulk of the material. At a certain point, though, trade out those chops for something in the middle or choked up nice and tight. With a little practice, you can do some pretty fine work that doesn't act like this. Good start, a little less than halfway through. Go a little further up and remove some more before you flip it over. Now I was just doing something a bit unsafe. I was chopping with my right leg leading. I should lead with my left leg. That way, when this goes through, it's clear. I'm not going to hit my leg. If I'm the other way, and it goes through more than I expect, because I'm giving this a lot of power, it could easily hit my leg. Be mindful of your surroundings and yourself and where your tool is. Now we're at a great point to flip this over and start working this material down. I really like this curvature it has at the end. This end stays in line with the other end. That means I can keep it in. It will give a lot of neat character to the bow. I'm going to use a scythe whetstone to keep my axe sharp. I'm really just touching up the very edge. Right now, I'm not even using water on it. So we've carved this down almost to the center of the stave. You can see it's at its max thickness right now. That makes carving on that plane a lot more difficult. There's just a lot more surface area for the axe to bite into, which makes your chops less efficient. Now we're going to go ahead and start profiling the bow. Just a bit. It doesn't need to be a lot. We're just going to thin things out, because overall, this is going to be a lot easier to carve than this face. Once this is carved down on either side, this face becomes much easier to carve again. So it's a way of working smarter, not harder, even though we're not finalized on the shape of the bow yet. Although, in general, I think I'm going to follow the curves of the bow. I like the natural curve this stave has. It'll be a reflection of the tree it came from. And I think that's pretty cool. Carving like this is very stiffening work. Your hands are going to really feel it. Take breaks as needed. Be sure to be totally perpendicular to the back of the belly of the bow. And here, I'm not doing the same chopping rule, although I might do it sometimes. I can pretty much start up here and chop my way all the way down, just running curls off like this. I'm not worried about the axe diving too deep. If there's bulges on the sides from knots, it's best to follow the curve of the knot. If you go all the way through it, you can make a weak spot. But even if it leaves a bump on your bow right there, that's okay. Leaving it there is better than removing it for the strength of the bow. I'm a little more aggressive with the tapering towards the end of the limb. I'm really not sure if I want this to be a longbow or a shortbow. I'm really a shortbow person. I love shooting shortbows, but this is looking to be turning into a really nice longbow. As it stands right now, this is probably going to be more than five feet tall. It definitely puts this in the longbow category. I might shorten it just a little bit. I like shortbows, and they're more maneuverable in heavy force. Well, I'll keep carving it down, and then I'll make that decision. Choking up on your axe head like this, and do some of this finer carving, really saves the fatigue in your hands, too. It's still a chopping motion. I'm not just pushing. A lot of beginners just try and push like that, and use their muscles to push it through the wood. You still want to use the weight of the axe, and in fact, you can use the handle as a counterweight. So it still gives you lots of momentum, more than just the axe head on its own, so it's all in the wrist. I'm just going to follow that grain all the way down. I like this curve here. One good reason I've kept the spark on it up until this point is if I have a mishit with the axe, and the corner slides across the back, it doesn't gouge into any growth rings. We need to have all the carving within a single growth ring. The bark is protecting it that way. If I cut through the bark, no big deal, I'll carve that off later anyway. Ideally, I would like to just use the outermost growth ring. That way, I can carve through just the bark, and most of it will peel off readily from the wood. And then, smooth the surface of the bow a bit, and it'll be totally ready. And the back won't need any further preparation than that. Now, not all woods work well that way. Maple is a very forgiving wood, and you can use that outer growth ring without much difficulty. Osage orange, on the other hand, you might want to carve down to a denser growth ring. The outermost growth ring is less dense. We've got to shorten this tip a little bit. It has all this damage from where I initially chopped it, from the tree itself. Chop it from the belly side, tapering outward. It helps if you have a more solid surface than this. Carve down this other side here. Looks like we've got a very pithy center here. I hope that's going to hold up. Carve it thinner. At this point, this is looking much more like a bow. Still a lot of work to go, still too thick to even bend. This is a good start. I might narrow it just a little bit further, then carve that belly more. I like to make bows that have integral handles. That means there isn't a distinct carved-out handle that's narrower and thicker than the rest of the bow. It just all kind of blends together. This is how many of the old Native American bows were made. When you do this, you actually get some bend in the handle when you draw your bow back. So it's important that you do make it just thick enough that it's not going to be a weak spot. My maple bow that broke, actually broke on one of the upper limbs, not down at the handle, even though there was a considerable amount of bend in the handle. Now you can see by choking up on the axe head, I find control to remove some of these bigger cuts. Now I'm actually refining the profile a bit more. Cutting it down to a thickness I like. And to reduce stress on the bow overall, I think I will keep it a longbow. I really need this bow to work for me for a little while. I could even just make it a longbow for my next hunt, and then carve it down into a shortbow and give it a backing. One thing I haven't mentioned in carving this yet that I hope is obvious, is all the carving is going with the grain. With a round stave that isn't twisted, that's not hard to do. That's why I'm keeping these organic curves in the bow. You can even see the center sap tube, to some extent, staying true to center, even through this curve. That makes sure there's not a weak point at the edge of the limb. If I had carved this straight, it would have violated the grain, and it would have made a weak point where this could break easier. Alright, let's do a little more of the shape we're looking for. I really like that in the back. The handle is just about narrow enough for me to hold. Now I'm just going to work on thinning the belly more, get our taper going. Once it's properly carved out, then I'll use a scraping tool. I'll show you that in a minute. And I'll use that to do all the finish work. I pretty much don't use sandpaper on my bows. Just the rough, and then the fine carving, and then scrape it. That leaves a pretty good finish. Then I'll oil it up, too. This axe, with pretty much a Scandi grind on it, is able to remove all the coarser chopping marks really efficiently. With a little practice, you can even chase curls a good portion down the bow. So I'm trying to carve this as flat as possible. I like the bellies of my bows to be almost dead flat. Maybe just a little bit of chamfering on the edges. Now, I'm not going to get them dead flat all the way across the surface. The closer I get it to flat, the easier it is to scrape it evenly. I'm having to really lean into the bow, anchor it into the ground. It's so flexible now, it shakes quite a bit as I chop. At the last few inches of the tips, I quit tapering, and just bring the tips down to the same thickness as the lower part of the belly. If you taper the tips too severely, they'll get too much bend when you string the bow, and they'll be a weak point. You want most of the flex from your bow to be midway through each of the limbs. Some of the bark split off, revealing that this is entirely worm-eaten in the inner bark, maybe in the first growth ring. I forgot that I had cut this stave as standing dry wood. That's always a risk with that. This one was standing and dry, so I assumed it would be good for a bow, especially considering I couldn't see any cracking. We will see if this works. I might have to scrape down to the lower growth ring. Anytime you cut bow staves, always cut more than you need. Same with arrows. I cut more than twice as many arrow shafts as I need, and even then I usually end up with less than half of them being useful. This limb is just a bit stiff, so I'm thinning it down a little bit more, then we'll be able to go on to the real tillering. Alright, let's see how this is bending. This has got quite a bit of bend at this point. I can't really see which limb is bending more, although it feels like this one is right now. We're about ready to move on to the scraping. I'll scrape all the bark off, get this all down to one growth ring. I'll chamfer all these edges too. Right now we have sharp edges where the belly goes off the edge. You can see the thickest point here, right about here, about where the handle is. You can see the sap tube remains here. Now we're essentially done with all the axe carving. So far I've spent a little over an hour on this bow. It's coming along quick. The thing is, with Rocky Mountain Maple, you don't even need to start with seasoned wood. You can carve a bow green. As long as you carve it down quickly, it's not going to crack, and it'll dry within a few days in warm weather. Or you can force dry it over a fire, get some fire hardening on it. That's why it's one of my favorite bow woods. It's just really versatile. Always fun to try and start a fire in wet weather. Our bow's looking good. It's got this cool curve to it. That S-curve is not a problem. I think it'll make for a really cool bow. Now I've got to get the rest of the bark off this bow. That'll be some of the only dry fuel for the fire I have around here. I'll use my bushcraft knife for that. This is the Sage Smoke Survival Bushcraft Knife. Last year I had a run of 200 of these knives made. I've rapidly whittled that stock down, and they really are great knives. Me and a friend designed it, based on a knife I made and really love. Right now I'm just using my knife to get the bulk of the bark off. I'll go through and scrape everything really thoroughly with a little steel scraper. This scraper was made from a dull bandsaw blade. I cut a section out of the blade and ground off the teeth. I made sure the edges were sharp and square. That makes a great scraping tool. In the absence of steel tools, you can break certain stones like flint and obsidian to similar angles. That's what the original bow scrapers were made of. I'm cutting the bark off carefully. I don't want the knife to dive into any of the wood. That will violate growth rings, and I'll have to carve everything down below that growth ring. With all that bark removed, let's see if we can scrape under all these bug lines. To scrape the wood down, just hold the scraper like this at an angle. It's not quite 90 degrees. Just tilt it slightly towards you. Pull it towards you. It looks like we're getting under all those bug lines already. Or you can even push it away. My scraper has a slight burr on almost all the edges. That makes it nice because that acts as a micro planing blade. It curls the wood off quite easily. It should just take a couple minutes to scrape down past all this. The bug damage is a lot less severe than I thought it was. Though there are quite a few pinholes in the bugs. Right there, you can see, that's a low spot right there. It goes underneath the growth ring down into the next one. We'll have to carve everything down to this level. I feel this tip got pretty wet. It soaked up a lot of water. I'm going to dry it out by the fire as I work. Not a bad way to be working on a wet winter day. Even if you don't know exactly what to do at every step, I really encourage you to go out and try and carve a bow. Even if it's from something that's not a great bow wood, still try it out. You'll learn a lot about bow carving. There's plenty of information online about which woods are good. You can look up your region good bow woods. There's probably a Reddit page that gives you some answers. I've got a knot here that's almost in the middle of the bow. I'm going to carefully carve the bark away from it. I want to touch as little of the wood as possible. I'm just getting that lower bark layer. Then I can do some scraping around it. And chamfer all those edges too. You can see all these little scratches and those little cuts. I'm going to scrape down until all those are gone on the side of the bow. Eventually we'll do the same thing on the belly, but I need a little more shaping before then. Alright, it's turning into quite a nice long bow. I just have one thick area left right here. You can see the sap tube still there. I'm going to work that area down a bit and we'll start our floor tillering. If you're in a damp environment the seasoned wood shavings are excellent tinders. Hang on to them if you need to start fires. It's pretty easy to work if you're just braced against a tree like this. I can support the back of the bow with my shoulder and thin out areas that need it with my axe. It's surprisingly easy to smooth out these marks with a scraper. The scraper will likely be the tool you use for the longest. In the whole process I've probably used my axe for about an hour and a half, maybe two hours. I've already used the scraper at least that long and I still have more growth ring tracing to do. Bracing against a tree like this allows you two hands so you can get a more effective scrape on the bow. Now I'm scraping the back of the bow down to a single growth ring. You can see a bit of a dark border here. That's where one ring ends and the next one starts. You can figure out which ring is the top ring or the bottom ring based on how that dark border moves when you scrape it. You have to scrape it all down to the lower ring and then be very careful not to cut or carve through that ring or else that violation could cause failure and you'd be better off carving down to the one below it. Chase that growth ring all the way down to a single ring. There's a couple spots around the knots where I left a little bit of the other growth rings because they shouldn't cause a problem of delamination. They shouldn't cause the bow to fail. Now it's time to carve out the nocks and get this fitted with a tillering string essentially. I'm just going to use a piece of paracord for that. We'll start tillering it. I'm mostly just trying to get the limbs to bend even. I think this bow will be around 50 or 60 pound draw weight and that's what I'm looking for. If it's just too stiff and pulling too heavy I'll scrape it down a bit. Now once I get it tillered to how I like it I'm also going to give it a coat or two of this. This is bear grease. I scraped the fat off of a black bear skin and rendered it down. It's this kind of liquidy yellowish colored grease. Bear grease is great as well as other animal fats because it takes a lot for them to oxidize and go rancid. I'll also give the handle area a buckskin wrap. Right now I can differentiate where the handle is based on the sap tube and this knot here. My hand goes right here. I gave this bow a really light sanding with some 400 grit sandpaper because I had left it out for a couple hours last night not realizing it and it started snowing really heavy. It got some snow on it and absorbed some water and that raised the grain and left a rough feeling. I dried it out overnight just over the fireplace but it still felt rough. So I just gave it a little buff with 400 grit sandpaper. Now it feels a lot smoother. I carved out one side like this. I like to tie the bowstring to the bow itself on a different style of knot that I'll do on the other side. Then this side is really great for the other side of the bowstring where I make a loop. That loop is able to just hook right over this and make stringing the bow pretty easy. I'm just carving a V cut. I'm trying to round it out a little bit. I'll do that right here on the other side too. I'm favoring the belly just a little bit because that's where the string is going to be pinching. Basically the two sides of the loop will pinch on the belly so I'm trying to make the path to the belly a little easier. You can angle your knot to achieve that but the tip of this knife is really good for it. Little scooping motions like that. When I designed this knife I had wood carving and bow making specifically in mind along with skinny animals and that sort of stuff. It's not just meant to be a beefy camp knife. This is a precision tool. I like to do more than just split firewood. We'll pull out about the length of the bow itself and we'll start by just tying a clove hitch on one end. This ground is wet and this bow is unsealed so I'm trying to keep this as dry as possible. I'm going to brace it on my boot that is the end that I tied the string on to. I'm basically going to brace it without any bend in the bow right now. I'll just make a loop. I'll find where I want the top of the loop to be I'll put a pinch in the string right there. Now I can pretty much just tie a loop. There we are so far. You can see here because of the bend in that limb the string favors this side a little bit. That's okay. It feels nice and strong. Let's see which limb is bending more. This upper limb is definitely bending a lot more. I'm going to scrape down the middle of the limb a fair bit. I'm not surprised. That's a stiff limb. It felt that way from the beginning. Let's see how we're looking. I think this knot will be able to hold pretty well. This is the limb that was stiff. We'll see if it's still having less bend. This limb naturally has some deflex already. It's bending a lot better. It might still be a little stiff. I might just do a little more scraping right in here just to get a little bit more of an even bend. I've got a lot of bend happening right here. That's because of this deflex here. It feels like there's more bend closer to the handle on this side than on this side too. I don't want to reduce the weight of the bow much more. I'm just going to do a bit right over here. I'm thinking that's looking a lot more even. It's certainly good enough to shoot with. I'm realizing how poorly this camera does in low lighting. Sorry everything is so grainy in this video. I hope the value of the information I've given you is enough to outweigh the quality of the footage. Now we're going to go on to oiling up the stave. I'll get the fire roaring hot. Now it's just a smolder. I'm using it to smoke a squirrel hide. I'll move the squirrel hide so we don't scorch it. We'll get this fire blazing and I'll be able to warm up the bow so that bear grease melts right into the wood. We'll be ready for a handle and string. That's more like it. I'm using a bandana to apply the grease. I'll try not to get any on my pants. I'll heat it up over the fire so it soaks in. There's no way around it. You're just going to get your hands greasy. You're in a workshop. I'm sure you can stay pretty clean. That's how it is here. The heat opens up the pores of the wood and allows that grease to soak in a lot deeper. It also makes the grease much more liquid so it can penetrate those pores better. Here's the bow finished, all strung up with its final string. This is a rawhide string. If you want to see how it's made, I've linked to the YouTube short showing how. It's pretty easy to make rawhide string. Some other string materials are a lot better, especially plant-based strings. Now this bow is a little bit big for running through the woods. I've put a lot of shots through it by now. It's been a few days since I had it completed. I've got some arrows made up specifically for this bow. Tipped with obsidian points, tricky thudded fletchings, red osier dogwood shafts, and sinew wrappings. I've got to get some more made up. The bow is nice and snappy and that's one of the reasons I love Rocky Mountain Maple for self-bows. I'm more of a short bow person. Short bows are just a lot more maneuverable through heavy brush and timbers like this. The other benefits are you need less materials overall. You need shorter bow staves, shorter arrows, and shorter string. When you're making everything yourself, that goes a long way. I just find them really fun to shoot. I'll do some hunting with this bow this year, so stay tuned for all that. I really do like how this bow turned out overall, even though I'm not much of a longbow person. I might do some re-curving on the ends to give it a little more power. Then I might fire harden the belly. I hope this all showcases to you that making your own bow is not terribly complicated. It just takes time. If you take your time with everything and think out each step, it should all work. Not every bow is going to survive that long, but the more you do it, the better you get at it. Sometimes you just have to get started and get your first bow out of the way. You'll learn a whole lot from that. Then you can go on to try making more bows of different styles. Before long, you'll be a very competent bowyer and have the satisfaction of actually hunting with a bow and arrow you make. It leads to all sorts of other crafts, too, like making the arrows, making your own quiver. This one's a badger skin. It's just rawhide. That's one of the nice things about quivers. Rawhide is stiff. It holds the arrows in a little bit better than a soft hand hide. I'm sure I'll make a video in the future showing how to make your own rawhide quiver. I also gave this a quick buckskin wrap. It's getting pretty dirty now. I'm going to do a better one. The wrap goes pretty much dead center of the bow. That way, when you knock your arrow, the arrow is actually above center. Right now, it's totally shootable. I've almost gotten some squirrels with it. I need some more practice arrows. I don't want to hit a squirrel with a stone arrowhead because it's kind of a waste of an arrowhead. Oh, and side note before I forget. For maintenance of the bow, any time it gets wet, I'm going to dry it out as quick as I can. It's really handy if you have a wood stove in your home because you can put the bow right next to the wood stove and just get it dried out really fast. For the first few weeks, I'm going to oil it really, really regularly. It should be oiled every day for the first couple weeks. Then you can do it less frequently and you can pretty much stop oiling it except for once a year or once every few months. That's going to give it a really deeply permeated coat that is going to help repel water. If you want a bow that lasts decades, that's what you do. In this video, I used bear grease. Any sort of oil that's not going to go rancid easily is going to work great for that. Drying oils are especially good, like linseed oil. Anyway, thanks for watching. Check out my rawhide bowstring short. If you liked the knife I was using in this video, it's still available on my website. There's a link for that in the description. If you want to learn more from me, consider joining my Patreon. I've got exclusive content there. I have a group class over Zoom happening every single month where you get to participate and ask questions in real time and learn all sorts of different topics. We just had a class on brain tanning your own furs. I showed how to brain tan a squirrel fur in real time. That was a very popular class. Links in the bio for that. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in the next one.