How To Build A 50lb Recurve Bow From a 12 Red Oak Board (Step By Step)

I'm about to show you guys how I turned this $12 Home Depot board into a 55-pound hunting bow. So red oak gets a bad reputation, but if you build it the right way, it's going to hold up just fine, take on very little set, and turn out to be a great hunting bow. So stay tuned. I'm going to show you the exact process I used to build this bow, from board selection, dimensions, how I recurved the limbs, and how I tailored it to give me a 55-pound draw. So if you want to save yourself a few hundred bucks on a high-performance hunting bow, stay tuned. All right, let's start off with board selection. So when you go to your hardware store, whether it be Home Depot, Lowe's, or whatever other stores you've got, you're going to have a few options of hardwoods to choose from, between red oak, maple, hickory, and a few others. But your best bet is going with the maple, hickory, or red oak. In my case, the hardware stores don't carry any maple or hickory, so the best option I have is red oak. When you're choosing a board, make sure you have straight grain running from the bottom of the board to the top. Also on the sides, you want to make sure there's no runoff with the grain. So with red oak, if you have a heavy enough draw weight, and the grain runs off the side or the back of the bow at any point, then you're most likely going to end up with a back failure. All right, so since I'm going for a 55-pound draw weight, and I want to recurve the limbs, to help distribute that stress, we're going to go for a 68-inch length and two-and-a-half-inch wide limbs. The wider limbs is also going to help with excessive string followers. The board I chose was 76 inches. I included an extra 8 inches for a handle. We're going to go ahead and mark 68 inches off. We're going to cut that extra 8 inches off. We're going to use that for our handle. All right, next we're going to find the center of the board, which in this case is 34 inches. We're going to mark 4 inches above that line and 4 inches below that line. That's going to be our 8-inch gap for the handle. We're going to use Titebond to secure this handle onto the board. There seems to be a little debate online whether or not you should scrape the wood before applying the Titebond. A few carpenters have said the glue actually bonds better to a completely flat surface, but on all the bow-making forums, everyone says to scrape first. I've done both ways. It doesn't seem to make a difference. I've never had a handle pop off on me, so this time I did not scrape. All right, so we're going to apply a thin layer of glue and let it tack up a bit. Now once it tacks up, we're going to add some more glue and drop that handle on there. Now we're going to clamp it down and let it dry overnight. We'll start working on it in the morning. I've also sat some dumbbells on top of the handle, and that seemed to work just fine. So use what you got. All right, next we're going to measure the working limb, which is from the bottom of the handle to the tip of the bow. We have a 30-inch working limb, so with that, we're going to measure 15 inches. That's going to be our mid-limb. Now we're going to go to the bottom of the bow. We're going to mark out the nocks. So the less mass you have on your nocks, the more efficient your bow is going to be, and the more cast it's going to have. So we're going for half-inch nocks. We'll mark a center line and then a quarter inch to each side of that center line. We're just going to draw a straight line from the mid-limb all the way down to the outer nock points. So now I went ahead and I cut these lines out. This is the first time I use a saw to do it. In the past, I've done just the farrier's rasp. It takes a lot longer that way, but you are more precise. If you're going to use a power tool, just remember to be careful. I ruined a ton of bows going too fast with the power tools. So after using that saw, I go ahead and clean it up with this farrier's rasp and get real close to that line. All right, next we're going to make all the markings on the handle. So we'll start off with the center line. Then we're going to go an inch and a quarter either side of the center. That's going to be our arrow rest. And then two inches from each end of the handle, we're going to make our fade marks. So this is where the handle is going to start to fade into the bow. All right, and after that, we're going to mark a line down the side of the bow. This is going to be a reference point, so we know how low on each side we're bringing down the bellywood. This is just to make sure that you're not going to take one side lower than the other. I chose half an inch based on previous bows that I've made. Make sure you're measuring from the back of the bow up. That line we made two inches off the handle, we're going to drag it down to the side of the bow. And we're going to take something round like a dinner plate, a dog bowl in this case, and we're just going to trace a line from that two inch mark all the way down to that half inch mark on the side of the bow that we made. That's going to be our fades into the bow. Then we're going to take a chisel and a hammer and we're just going to chisel away at that line until we have a nice fade. So based on things I've read online and based on my prior experiences working with Red Oak, the most efficient tool at removing bellywood is a farrier's rasp. The draw knife doesn't seem to do a great job with Red Oak. I primarily use the farrier's rasp. So to start removing bellywood, we're going to start on the side and we're going to keep the rasp at a slight angle. We don't want too dramatic of an angle because then you're not really removing wood off the belly. And we're going to come down to that line. And once we do that on one side, we're going to do the same thing on the other side. That's going to leave us with a nice crown running down the middle of the bow. Once we have that crown, we can start removing that crown slowly. We'll move on to tillering. Once we start to remove enough wood off that belly, we're going to move on to floor tillering. Pretty much what we're doing here is just checking to see that the limbs are bending equally. We don't want one limb bending a lot more than the other. That's going to put more tension on the weaker limb and that's not ideal. That bottom limb is bending a little bit more than the other one. So I'm going to go back and remove some more wood off the belly. Once I do that, check again with the floor tiller, make sure everything's bending equal. And now's going to be my preferred time to add recurves to the tips. We're going to pull the bow out of the steam and drop it right into the form and try to bend it. Take it slow. Don't go too quick. I happened to be in a rush while I was doing this and I don't think I steamed it quite long enough and the bow started to splinter and the splinter was pretty bad. For some reason I decided to force it. I must have been frustrated and here we go. We got a broken limb tip. I had to go back to Home Depot, pick out another board. So quickly we're going to run through all the steps all over again and we're back to where we started, putting the tip into the recurve form. I went ahead and steamed this one a lot longer and we had no issues this time. We got a nice recurve. This one just worked out perfectly. I think we had very light splintering. I went ahead and sanded it away. Went ahead and recurved the other limb. We had a bit more splintering on this one. I just sanded it down, got rid of the splinters and it worked out perfect. We got a beautiful recurve in both of the tips. Now we're going to go ahead and carve out the string nocks. So we're going to go ahead and make a mark at three quarters of an inch from the top and we're going to take a speed square and put a nice 45 degree angle and we're just going to connect all the lines, make sure everything's lined up nicely and then we'll start off with just a handsaw, get a groove going. Once that line is in, we'll switch to a chainsaw file and we'll put a nice thick round groove in there enough so that the string is going to fit. This is just a rough draft so we'll perfect it as we get closer to the final product. We're going to check the floor tiller one more time before we decide to string it up and jump to tillering. Little bit of unevenness there so we're going to remove some more bellywood and now we're going to jump to floor tillering. So big thing to watch out for when you're floor tillering is make sure that you're not using a string that's too long. It's not good for the limb mechanics and it could possibly hide hinges and other mistakes in your bow. So make sure that there's no slack in the line. So now we're just checking the limbs, checking the bend, making sure everything's bending equally and just marking out any imperfections. So here I'm marking an X to let myself know not to remove any more wood off of there because we don't want too much bending near the handle. It's a mistake that a lot of beginners make, removing too much wood near the handle. And for me at least, I end up getting a ton of crystals and compression fractures near the handle on most of my bows. So I'm trying to avoid that. And then here I'm just marking where I want to remove some wood. I'm seeing some stiffness in that area so I mark it and now it's just a matter of going back and forth between the tillering tree and removing bellywood and going back and forth and back and forth. You can see now that I'm also starting to shorten that tillering string. We're not quite at full draw yet, but we're getting closer. I think we're about four inches in this clip. I went ahead and removed some more wood. Now you can see we're at full brace height. Once you're at full brace height and you're removing bellywood, you want to go real slow because even five or 10 scrapes can make a ton of difference at this point. So now I'm just being very careful, removing a very small amount of wood at a time. As you're drawing the bow on the tillering tree, if you're shooting for a 50 pound draw weight or whatever your draw weight is, make sure to never go past that draw weight. There's no reason to overstress the lens. I have a gray line marked. That is 24 inches. Right there we hit it. We're 50 pounds at 24 inches. I think my actual draw length is about 26, but we're going to end up losing some weight after we break the bow in anyway. So it should settle in around 55 pounds at 26 inches. All right. Now that we're done with the tillering, we're going to go ahead and carve out the handle. So we're going to put the grip slightly above center. On that grip line, we're going to go ahead and mark half an inch from each end. And then we're just going to trace a line from each end of the handle to that half inch line. All right. Then we're going to take our farrier's rasp and just remove wood until we hit those lines. That thinner rasp is going to be easier for getting into the center and getting those tighter curves. All right. And also this is just a rough draft. As we get closer to the end, I'm going to tighten this handle up and make it a little bit thinner and more fit to my hand. We're going to take our chisel. We're going to chisel out a little groove there. Once we got that little groove chiseled out, we're going to go ahead and start our arrow rest. Put an arrow rest or not. It's up to you. It's personal preference. I like to have one. We're going to go ahead and take a line almost to the center of the bow, but not quite. And then we're just going to chisel out an arrow rest. All right. And then for shaping the nocks, I seem to have lost that footage. This is some footage from an older bow that I made. You're pretty much just going to use that small rasp and carve out the nocks. But here in this next clip, you'll see the actual shape that I chose for the nocks. Now it's just a matter of sanding everything down. I started with, I think, 120 grit. I jumped to like 240, then 600, then 1200. Work your way up through sandpaper. You're going to get a nice smooth finish on that bow. After that, I went ahead and threw on about six coats of true oil just to seal everything up, make sure that the bow's not going to take on any extra moisture. She's looking pretty good. Two and a half inches wide, 63 inches from nock to nock. I don't have a string for it yet. I already ordered the string, but it's just not here. Ten yards. All right, I got my brand new camera right behind the target. Let's hope I don't miss and hit the camera. All good shots. Five yards. Ten yards. This is probably the furthest hunting shot I would take. Waiting for this wind to settle down. Let's give it a shot. This is usually the limit for most traditional bow hunters, but I would not be taking a shot this far. 20 yards. Ooh, just low. Oh, I think that was low, too. Oh, I hit the top of the target. Got it.