Making a Recurve Bow - Bow Building Tutorial

Hi guys, it's been a while since my latest video. To be honest it's the first bow I'm building this year. Today I'm gonna build a red oak recurve bow. I'm gonna use this red oak's tape. It was seasoned for approximately two years I think. Red oak is not the best quality bow without there and to reinforce the back of this weapon I'm gonna use this piece of rawhide. It's approximately two inches wide and a bit longer than this piece of wood. So to find out how to build this from that watch the whole video. If you are interested how to make such a stave from the log, from the freshly cut tree, watch my other video. You will see the link right here. So what we are gonna start with is what we call chasing growth rings. Our goal is to have a single continuous growth ring on the back of the bow. I will pick this one. I think this one should do the job. It's very important to keep the single growth ring on the back of the whole weapon because it makes the weapon more durable. As you can see the growth rings on the stave are pretty nice. Not too wide, not too thin. With a little amount of porous wood that makes this stave pretty nice. To chase the growth ring on this stave I'm gonna use a It's a basic bow making tool. Definitely my favorite one. Okay so here we are after the first stage of work. Now we are gonna draw the shape of our bow to be on this wood surface. Designing and laying out a bow on the stave is another crucial stage of bow making process. You can make a bow from the poor quality bow wood if you design the bow well but bad design can ruin even the best bow stave out there. So visually I start with marking the center of the stave and laying out the handle section. Then fades. I'm gonna make handle section four inches long and each of fades four inches long too. Then after each six inches I'm gonna mark another section. This will help me to keep the right taper on the whole length of the limb. Two most important things that we need to remember about when designing a bow is to follow the grain and adjust the design to the particular piece of wood but also to the bow we want to build. The worse quality the stave is the safer design we should apply. I'm making the handle a bit over one inch wide for now and fades a bit over two inches. Initial dimensions should be a little higher and should be reduced in the latest parts of the bow making process when we are closer to the final shape of the bow we want to get. Now I'm gonna lay up the limb. As you can see the stave is pretty straight so not much to do here. Okay so we have here a bit over two inches at fades and one inch at tips. The tips are left a bit too wide at this point. We will take care of the excessive material later. Well you can finally see a bow here. Now it's time to use some strength. We need to get the bow out of the stave. A piece of leather will protect the bag from the any damages from the vice. As I already mentioned the bag is crucial and should stay in the best condition possible. It's good to wear protective gloves and glasses at this point. When it comes to the work with draw knife it's better to spend additional couple hours on the work than ruin the whole bow build in a few seconds with too deep cut. So remember don't rush, work slowly, watch your blade. To shape the handle section quickly and safely I'm using To do so I'm gonna use this knife made for me by one of my friends. Very good knife maker. Check out his site right here. This knife was made especially for bow making. It's pretty big what allows us to chop the wood. It can serve also as a draw knife and what's more this edge right here is excellent for scraping. It turns out I need more firepower to deal with this stave so I'm gonna use what I call it quick material reduction technique. I will draw a line following the single goro print. Let's say it will be one inch of material left on the belly of the bow a bit more on the handle. Every few inches I'm gonna mark a section and I'm gonna split off the half to make two bows out of such a piece but it's far more risky and to be honest that piece wasn't not the best bow out there but definitely it's a great starter for all aspiring bowyers. It's very easy to work with that means you don't need to use much strength to work such a stave down the shape of the bow. A bit more work has to be applied on the sides of the stave. As you can see there is not much of the wood left on this bow so we can proceed with the next stage but let's clean up a bit here first. Our stave slowly starts looking like a bow. The things are getting pretty interesting. At this stage I'm gonna shape the stave. I will apply recourse here and deflex here. To do so I will heat the wood with steam coming from that pot. Then after 30 to 40 minutes I will put the stave in the recurving jig and let it cool down for a while. Before steaming it's crucial to make sure the stave fits into the jig. You can see this one fits pretty well. It is crucial to keep the right amount of the water in the pot. If it runs out it might burn the wood. So here's how we put the bow in the pot. It should be a bit above the level of the water. In the foil on the top. To keep the right temperature inside instead of the foil you can use a towel. Here are a few recurving jigs I made by myself for bow making. As you can see today I'm using the most aggressive one. Now it's a good time to mention about another great property of red oak wood. It's one of the easiest woods to bend with heat. What's more it keeps the new shape very well. To learn more about recurving check out this video. 30 minutes of steaming. Let's see what happens. Perfect. Clamps will hold the bow in the jig for the time of cooling down. So I was steaming this piece for 30 minutes and as you can see it bent like a butter. Crucial to put the bow straight in the jig after taking it off the pot. The warmer it is the easier it will be to bend. To save some time I'm gonna start heating this link. Meanwhile this recurve is still cooling down. Here we go with the second link. This tape starts looking pretty nice. To bend the handle I'm gonna use this jig. It's quite different and has many uses. It's the next day already and see how it turned out. I love this curve. It's really smooth. It's promising so far. There are three things I'm gonna do now. First of all I'm gonna soak this piece of rawhide in the water to make it softer and easier to apply on the bow. Meanwhile I'm gonna clean the back of the bow and prepare the hide glue which will serve me to apply the rawhide on the back of the bow. Firstly I'm putting this rawhide in the water. It should stay like this for an hour or so. Now it's a good time to prepare the hide glue. Firstly this granules should be mixed with the water in the one to one ratio. The glue should be mixed with the water properly and be put in the hot water bath. The glue should be heated in the 80 Celsius degrees. It should be mixed every few minutes until it gets very smooth. It takes 20 to 30 minutes to make it glue as it should be. The rawhide and the glue are being prepared. Now it's time to take care of the back of the bow. I will use my bow making knife to make the back cleaner and smoother. Such a clean back will connect much better with the rawhide. Here you can see the difference. The glue gets smoother slowly but as you can see it needs a bit more time. Meanwhile I have prepared some clamps. These are crucial for the proper applying of the backing. Especially at spots like this, at the recourse. Applying the backing with the use of hide glue is pretty challenging as the glue itself is pretty hot and when I use my fingers to apply it it's very sticky and all gets pretty messy during the process. Once it's applied you can hit certain spots, apply some correction and the first try is as successful as you wish. Everything's ready. Let's start the process. It was a terrible terrible experience but the bow looks pretty nice. I'm gonna use a heat gun now on the back. I will heat the whole back step by step and I hope the glue will hold even better now when it's additionally clamped by these strings. Here we are after a couple days. Should be more than enough for the glue to cure. So let's unwrap it and see how it looks. The bow looks great. The backing really sticks to the wood. I'm really happy with this bow so far. So let's cut the backing on the sides of the wood. I'm using this smaller but much sharper draw knife for that work. I just love how this row height looks on this red oak stave. It's just lovely. A lot of material has to be removed from the tips and from the handle section. As you can see it's pretty white, too white definitely. Working on the sides and removing material from the limb the main thing I need to remember about is the string alignment. The bow string has to go right in the middle of the bow, right in the middle of the handle for the good arrow release but also in the middle of the limb right here. If the bow string is off at the recourse it will be slipping off from the limb and that might even lead to the breaking of the bow. We are finally reaching perhaps the most challenging step on the bow making path. The tillering. Tillering is turning the stick into the bow. We will bend the stave step by step, inch by inch, observing and watching how the bend looks like or the bow is bending. After each observation the correction will be applied on the bow, specifically on the belly of the bow. Most of the tillering takes place on the belly. That's a bit more complex topic and our target is the balanced bend at the certain draw weight. I'm aiming for 30 or 40 pounds at 28 inches. The bow is quite short but the shape I applied on the stave and the backing should give me enough room to reach that draw length. We are talking about the balanced bend when the bow is bending evenly on the part of the limb designed to bend. There are many types of tillers. Here on this project I applied the tiller when the handle is stiff and the rest of the limb is working. It should work just a bit here. So the first stage of the tillering is what I call visual tillering. I just look at the stave, look at the grain on the limb and I remove it when I find the limb too thick. The grain tells really a lot. You can see and tiller the bow in a large part just by looking at the growth. The most important is how the bow bends because grain and wood might have different properties here and there. As an example here for you just take a look at this limb. It's clear that the limb is too thin here compared to the rest of the limb. So what we need to do is to remove the wood from here to there. Especially here. Often we need to take a look also at the other side. As you can see it is a bit different thickness profile here. I was just gonna warn you about one common mistake that can happen on this stage and I'm afraid I have done it by myself. What I'm talking about is rushing too much, working too fast and digging too deep at the certain spot. Right here I'm afraid I removed a bit too much material compared to the rest of the limbs. I don't know if you can see it on the camera. It might be an issue. I don't know how much will it harm my project. I guess we'll find out. From now on I'm switching to the scraping equipment. Now we need as much precision as possible. The bow is well tillered. It will conserve for many years with a good performance. You can already see how the There were a few loose spots where the rawhide wasn't that well glued with the wood. I reinforced them with a bit of epoxy. Now I'm gonna use my knife to work on that wood to rawhide transition to make it smoother, cleaner, nicer. Carve the string grooves. They are gonna be self-locked so no additional material glued on the tips. Now I'm gonna carve the string grooves right here on the belly to keep the bow string on the limb not to slip off at any side. Knocks are good for now and put a bit more of work later. The important is to polish these sharp edges. I can already feel that this limb is much weaker than the other. So what I'm gonna do is to mark that limb with my pencil to know on which one I'm gonna put more work. Marking spots is an excellent way to tiller the bow. Easy and effective. Once you will remove a bit of material here these pencil lines will disappear. So you will already know you have applied necessary correction. Another correction and back to scraping. For the next stage I'm gonna need a tillering bow string that is longer than the normal bow string. It won't stretch a bow. It's a good time to determine which limb is upper and which one is the bottom one. I'm gonna go with this as a bottom limb because it is a nicer limb. It is a bit stiffer. We want the bottom limb to be a bit stiffer as it is prone to more stress during the everyday use of the bow. And as I mentioned before I made a weak spot on that limb and that's why it is gonna be the top one. Okay the bow is ready for the tillering tree and I have to say that the best way to see the bend of the bow from the distance and determine which spots are stiffer and which are weaker. I love this tool. It's not that simple to build but it's worth all the efforts. It's a game changer for the bow maker. The bows with the initial bend on the stave like this one with a bend here, there, here and here are tougher to tiller as curves are tricking our eye. Initial curves can be added like this one or natural from the natural stave character. The one must be especially careful tillering such a bow. So let's take a look at this bend. I'm drawing it to 21 inches with a long string now and after correction I'm gonna draw it one inch further. At the moment I have approximately 40 pounds at 21 inches. I think this limb is a bit too weak. That one needs more work especially in the inners. Okay it feels like I'm kind of rushing a bit too much. The second bending and I'm already at 24 inches with the long string. As you can see the bow is bending pretty nice but I still think that needs just a bit more work. On this limb I think the tips could use a bit of scraping and also inners but not much. We don't have a lot of material on limbs already so we need to be careful. Looks amazing so far and I think it's ready for the actual bowstring. I found a bowstring that will be suitable for this bow so let's string it and see how it looks. The bow looks pretty good. The top limb is a bit weaker and it can be seen in the profile but let's give it a shot. I'm really really rushing on that tillering. If you are not going that fast don't worry. I just have made over 100 bows and I hope I know what I do. Brace height on this bow is already quite high. Due to my laziness I haven't searched for the more suitable bowstring for that tillering stage but let's see what happens. This bow seems to handle that stress really well now. Before proceeding with tillering I have to apply heat correction on that recurve. As you can see the bowstring isn't in the center of the grooves. Once the bow is drawn it will leave the groove and string the bow. In the worst case it could destroy our efforts. Break the bow. I can't hit the recurve itself as it would unfold. Use the heat gun here and push the recurve to fix the string alignment. The string alignment is fixed. The bow is strung up. Let's see it at 25 inches. 40 pounds at 25 inches. Last corrections and the bow is ready for the full draw. Okay the final try at 28 inches. Let's see if it survives. Wow I'm really really happy with this bow. The tiller is great in my opinion. To be honest I didn't expect this bow to turn out that good. The final draw weight will be approximately 45 pounds at 28 inches. To be honest what's even more impressive is the embrace profile of this bow. It's almost the same like it was before tillering. The time for the final touches. I'm starting with thinning down the handle. It doesn't need to be that wide. Then I'm gonna polish the whole bow. Trying to remove as much tool marks as possible and to smooth all the edges. So I have an idea how to finish the back of this bow. I'm gonna start with painting the back painting the bow. I named this bow Rusalka. It's a Slavic mythical creature. Also I burned this arrow pass mark. I'm using water-based varnish to seal the bow. Firstly I'm gonna seal the back twice and then the belly twice. Let's go. For the handle I decided to apply red flax twine wrap and I'm gonna seal it with the hide glue. Finally guys time to test the bow. So we are after the first shooting and I have to say I really love this bow. It's a great shooter. It's a very very smooth shooter. It's not the fastest bow I've built. I think it's closer to 35 pounds. It's a bit weaker than I expected but man it's a real pleasure to shoot this bow. So if you are still watching this video thank you very much. I really appreciate every single one of you being here. Thank you and see you in the next video.