Hickory Self Bow build- making a hickory self bow for the young archer

Hey, Tracy Nelson with Creation Adventures. Join me on this series of video as we build this simple D-style wooden hickory bow for that beginning archer. I didn't build this for super speed. I built it for durability and function for that beginning archer. It's a low poundage bow, smooth draw, and just to get that beginning archer used to shootin', used to drawin' and shootin' a wooden bow. And that's the way it looks when it's unstrung. Nothin' fancy, so join me and we'll build this bow together. A light poundage bow, self bow as it is, a heavy poundage self bow for the obvious reason that the wood is not gonna be under that kind of strain with a lighter bow. So what I'm gonna be buildin' is somethin' similar to this right here. This is a bow that I built probably 20 years ago. I started buildin' self bows in 1993. And over the years, I've built maybe somewhere around 100 self bows. And a lot of them I've built for children because I've tried to introduce as many young people as I can to traditional archery because it's such a fun sport and a good sport. This is a, this one's built out of Osage Orange and it's probably shot in the neighborhood of me teachin' children and young people to shoot. This bow has probably shot, I don't know, 20,000 arrows at least over the years and been through all kind of abuse where people pullin' it back and dry firin' it. But it's a, it's a D bow, which means there's no stiff handle section. I have a handle, you know, made onto it with some bank line that I've epoxied on there and, you know, used some glue, put a rest on there. But it builds, I mean, it bends evenly throughout the bow. This bow is maybe 20 pounds. And the thing about when you're startin' a young person into archery, because they're not used to drawin' a bow, that it's kind of an awkward movement for them. And so you don't want anything that's gonna be real heavy and difficult. Plus, I like to use these, this rubber or plastic tubing and I'll put on the string to help with their hurtin', help with their fingers and the string so they don't have to wear a glove because that adds to the awkwardness when they're tryin' to figure out how to put the arrow on the string, you know, knock it and hold it on. You know, there's just a lot of stuff that you've gotta work with a young person on to get them used to shootin' the traditional bows. So anyway, that's our plan today is to start on a bow out of hickory. Now, so here's my stave and you can tell I've already worked on this one. This actually was one piece of wood. I split it, it split perfectly. I mean, it just really split well. And this one still has the bark on it. This stave is probably over 10 years old. I've had it in the rafters of my building for about that long. And finally decided that I'd make somethin' out of it. So what I'm gonna do is you can see I have taken the outer bark off and part of it's showin' here down to the sapwood. I just need to get the rest of this inner bark off down to the sapwood. So that's my next process. But what I think I'll do to start with, if I'm makin' a, my plan is to make, like I said, a child's bow. I'm gonna make a long, it's gonna be a long bow. And this one, you know, this one is probably, I'd say it's 60 inches. And so I'm gonna make one about 60 inches. I don't need this wide of a stave. This limb is about an inch wide. And so what I think I'm gonna do is go ahead and split this one again. And yes, I do risk, if it doesn't split just perfectly, I might only get one stave. But I'm gonna have to take a lot off anyway. So I'm gonna show you how I'm gonna split this and try to get two staves out of it. So what I'm gonna do is I'll cut the film, and I just use my ax, and I just split the edge. And I'm just gonna figure out where about halfway the stave is. This stave's about two and a half inches. So that's gonna give me about an inch and a quarter. Right here, I have a knot. And no panic, when you make a live bow, you can actually have knots in your wood. And so, let's take this. This piece on the left is definitely gonna be a lot thinner than the one on the right. What I have here is I've got two points where I have a knot, and a grain one around that knot, which I figured would be one. Nothing in the world will still be able to use. There you go. So I just need to come through here, and try to get it all in place. Okay, so I've got my bow in my, I don't have one of those nice bow vices that you see some of the guys have. That is a nice setup to have, though. So what I'll do, I mean, it's real easy, is you figure out your dimensions on your bow. And I want about an inch. I've got about an inch. I mean, I could have an inch and a quarter. It wouldn't hurt anything. It's just gonna have to be a lot thinner. Okay, so basically, when you're doing self bows, a good rule of thumb is the thicker, okay, the narrower the limbs, the thicker the limbs are gonna be, depending on your draw weight, okay? So narrow limbs equal thick limbs, if you're trying to get a heavy draw weight. Thin limbs, okay, if you make them wider, you can have thinner limbs. And it seems to me, what I've learned over the years about wood, is thinner, wider, thinner bow limbs bend, they bend better and smoother than thick, narrow limbs. Does that make sense? Now, there's a lot of guys out there making, showing bows online. They've come a long way since 93, when I started with a few books, the Bow Your Bibles books by several guys. And then there's one called The Bent Stick by Paul, I think it's Paul Comstock, wrote The Bent Stick. And he did a lot of experimentation with whitewoods because used to people said, well, you know, you couldn't make decent bows out of whitewoods. And he, you know, destroyed that myth by making a lot of hard shooting bows with whitewoods. So, that's what we wanna do. We wanna make a good, now this is, like I said, this is for a child. So I'm not worried about it shooting, you know, 175 or 180 feet per second. We're just talking about something to get in the hands of a child that they're gonna enjoy shooting, they can draw, it's gonna be smooth, but it's gonna, you know, shoot a decent arrow at the target when they're learning. So what I'll do, let's say I wanna, it's better to go a little longer to start with if you need to, if you think you want a 60 inch bow, there's nothing wrong with going ahead and giving yourself 62 inches. So here's the thing, you can always take more wood off. You can't, but you can't add it once it's gone. So, I mean, I could even go longer if I wanted to. It doesn't really matter at this point. It's just, it's gonna leave me more to play with when I start bending the bow. And when you shorten it, let's say you make a 62 or 64 inch bow and it's too weak and it's really doesn't have much cast to it. You can always shorten that bow to make it a little stronger. So you take a couple of inches off of it and it would make it stronger and it should shoot better. So I'm gonna do this one 62 inches. So that's where I'm gonna cut it off at. And then as far as my width, let's go with, I'm gonna go with about a one inch width, okay? Now, right here, see this knot? This knot, I'll just have to work around, okay? And what I don't wanna do is cut into that knot. I don't wanna cut into that knot. I work around it with a rasp, scrape around it and just try to keep that knot intact. Just, you know, when you cut into the knot, you're gonna weaken the back of the bow. So these are just rough measurements. I'm not gonna take it all the way down to this pencil mark when I'm roughing it out. It's just kind of giving me a guideline. And so with these bows, you don't have to have perfect straight edges on your bows. You can make snake bows that, you know, as long as it lines up, you know, when it's not twisted or something, when you string it, you can have all kinds of curves in it and stuff like that. I've made some snakey bows that shoot just wonderful. And so there we are. I'll just now, I'll take and I'll cut this down to where I need it to be, that width. There's another knot I'm gonna have to contend with right here. It's gonna be right in the middle of the limb. There again, you just don't want to take your draw knife and cut through that knot. So I got two knots to contend with. That's not too bad on a hickory, you know, a hickory stave. All right.