African Wood Reflex Bow build

Hello everyone, welcome to today's video. On this channel we explore different kinds of woods we can use to make bows and today we're going to be using wood from Africa called padauk. So let's get started. Here is the board I selected. It's got a very straight running grain. So if you're anything like me, starting new to bow making, you've possibly heard of the Boyer's Bibles. They actually talk about padauk in the Boyer's Bible as being a wood you can or has been made into a bow. Usually I've seen padauk as a laminate of some sort, but this time we're going to make the entire bow out of padauk. Now if you're new to bow making, I would not recommend padauk for your first bow. However, I found it to be quite nice to work with, smells wonderful, probably should make a cologne out of it honestly, and is beautiful first and foremost. Very beautiful wood. Also may not be easy to get a hold of, so your best bow wood is usually the bow wood that you can get a hold of, honestly, and it's easy and relatively cheap. But as you can see, it makes beautiful, beautiful sawdust. Now here, just taking the bow and roughing up the handle for a glue-on. Got to line it up just right. Press a little bit to get that glue out and then put it right into the vise. Give it the best good clamp, not to squeeze out all the glue, but you definitely want a really good secure glue-on of that. I'm going through shaping the limbs. I found using the block plane worked really well for trimming off this. Since it's dimensional lumber, you don't want to get any tear out using the draw knife. I found draw knives work really well on stave bows, but not dimensional lumber, as you'll see in just a second. Here's one of the methods I use for tapering the limbs. See, just that easy. Now using a really sharp draw knife does make quick work on this wood. Got to be careful though and not take off too much wood at this stage. If you have a chinto rasp, I found that works really well with the wood and worked it pretty fast. Now prior to recurving this bow, I'm going to burnish the back using this metal burnishing rod to help the grain stay down during the bending process. This is my setup. You don't have to get this fancy, but I use a steamer made for wood steaming and I put the steamer into the pipe with the bow limb and wrap it with cloth and tinfoil to keep the heat in. Now being that this is an untried, untested wood for myself, I decided to do a test run. Doesn't that sound lovely? Should work perfectly on the real one, right? Guess there's only one way to find out. I decided to make the recurve a lot less aggressive in the moment, so bad time to do it, but I think it turned out being a really wise decision based off the previous experience we just experienced. Now it's looking good. Decided to go ahead and clamp it down all the way and no snaps, crackles, pops or rice krispies, so we're good. Now during this part of the bow making process, I needed to reduce a lot of the wood. I did find myself getting distracted quite often during this process because this wood smells just so darn good. Yep, gotta love that. Now back to business. Floor tillering next. Checking the slight curve that I got here before we go ahead and put it on the tree, see what my daughter thinks. All right, I think she approves of that one. Let's check this one. A little bit. Now if you're really confident in yourself as a bow maker, you can skip this long string tillering section, but I would definitely always do it, especially working with the new wood. As you can see, both limbs are bending very little and we're getting quite a bit of draw weight up without even having it to brace height yet, so we still got a lot of wood to remove. If you've never used a rod saw to cut in your nocks, you're missing out. Four stars. Totally recommend. Now after checking with that loose string, we can go ahead and head to a tighter string and check out the tiller. Not bad, not bad at all. Definitely got some stiff bods, but very good for the first try. To remove wood during this stage of the tillering, I always use a card scraper. Well sharpened, getting those nice beautiful curls. That way I don't remove too much wood, but I'm still doing a lot faster than sanding. So far, the bow is bending pretty well here. The limbs are even, but what was that? Looks like it'd be better idea to go ahead and back this bow. So we're going to use Smooth-On EA40 epoxy with some fiberglass cloth and mix that up and go ahead and put that on the back here. Protect it, make it last a lot longer, and still be able to see the redwood through the backing. Now lucky for me, I was able to figure out where the crack happened and it was in the handle area when I was trimming some of the wood off. So we went ahead and put the backing and overlaid it in the handle area to add that extra strength. And then just, you know, for safety, putting the backing over the entire back. Now after you cut your pieces of fiberglass, go ahead and put the Smooth-On epoxy over the entire bow and then place your backings onto the bow. Stabilize it with some 2x4s because that's really smart. And then massage in your epoxy, your fiberglass into your epoxy. One thing I've learned about this method is that you don't want any of your fiberglass to be dry or not impregnated with epoxy. So make sure you find those areas and add the epoxy as needed, and then work the excess out. Now if you haven't made yourself a hot box already for your bow cooking, don't worry, this epoxy will cure by itself on the shelf no matter what temperature. It takes a lot longer and the properties aren't as good, but it does work. I've done it both ways, prefer to put it in the hot box. After 8 to 10 hours, you can take it out, take a look at it, make sure it's good, and clean up the excess fiberglass off the sides. Then you get right back to tillering, making sure this thing bends evenly. I don't know about you, but it seems like the perfect tiller is always just a few scrapes away. And here we have it, 45 pounds at 28 inches. Since I wanted this to be a good shooter bow, I decided to add on a little piece for the arrow rest. A little bit of super glue and carving, there we go. Now after shaping the handle and doing some sanding, I found a slight fracture showing up here and only being saved by the fiberglass, so I decided to do a little bit different kind of a fiberglass wrap using just the single strands, not the cross-linked strands. That way I can get a similar kind of strength as if I was to wrap it in sinew or linen, but this way it's a similar material to what's already being used and it's very strong. But I'm just using 5-minute epoxy for this application. And then to save time, starting with multiple strands to wrap around there so I can get the right amount of thickness and width that I want to make sure I'm completely covering this start crack and making sure it's secured. Since it was very secured prior to removing the wood there, now that I shaped the handle I have to kind of protect that again. After triple checking the tiller and doing some final sanding, it's now time to apply the finish. And this is what padauk looks like with no stain and just an oil-based finish. Really makes that color shine. And today's choice of finish is teak oil. There are lots of other finishes I've used from polyurethane, spare urethane, danish oil, tung oil, but teak oil works very well for me. Now if you made it this far in the video, please show your support for this type of work by giving it a like or subscribing to my channel. I appreciate that. Overall, I really enjoyed working with this wood, though I'm still not sure I quite recommend it because of all the difficulties I've had. But man, that color and the smell of the wood will definitely bring me back to make another bow out of this someday. I really appreciate you watching to the end. Thanks for your support in this beautiful art. If you have a specific type of wood you'd like me to try making a bow out of, let me know and I'll give it a shot in my next video.