Making a hickory recurve

This is a hickory tree that I cut down in my grandpa's backyard and I cut it to 68 inches in length and then I split the log into quarters. It dried in my garage for about a year and now it's time to build a bow out of it. So what I've got to do first is take the bark off. There's the outer bark, this crumbly stuff, and then there's the cambium, which is the only part of a tree that's actually alive. It's a thin brown layer and it's got a grain structure just like the wood and it lays between the bark and the wood. We're going to take the bark off but leave the cambium on. As you can see there's a little bit of twist going on from end to end of this log. Almost every tree has some amount of twist in the grain and you can actually fix that using heat, which we'll do much later in this process. For right now, I'm just going to show you my standard bow design. A lot of thought goes into bow design. There's a relationship between the length and the width of the bow. The longer it is, the narrower you can get away with. The stronger you make your bow, the bigger it needs to be in every dimension. The longer the limb, the more weight the bow actually has to throw forward and all that extra weight slows down your string and your arrow. But if you make it too short, you end up with stack problems and string follow problems. I found my happy medium with hickory to be about 64 inches for a 55 pound bow. I'm going to come through and very aggressively remove wood. So I drew a line that's three quarters of an inch from the back of the bow. This is way thicker than necessary. So next what I'm going to do is I'm going to come down and cut lines with my saw and then I'll come back with a chisel or a hatchet head and knock those chunks off. And aside from power tools, this is the fastest way to remove wood off of the belly of my bow. For the width of the bow, I'm doing an inch and three quarters and then 12 inches from the ends, I taper down to half an inch. I'm just using a draw knife to remove all of this extra material. And then once I get it down to size, I can start tillering. For the handle, I did the same sawing and chiseling technique I used to thin the bow. Then I used a rasp just to clean up all of my lines. Hi dad! Yay dad! Hello! So now I've got cambium on the back of my bow blank and something that I've always wanted to try and do is make art with the cambium. With hickory and a lot of other whitewoods, people leave a little bit of cambium on in like streaks like a camel pattern. It looks really cool. But what if you could actually be so careful taking the cambium off that you could make patterns or art? That's what I'm going to try and do. First, I need to thin it down very carefully. I'll do that with a rasp. So this has taken some trial and error and I wouldn't recommend doing it. At first, I just started drawing hoof prints and then I realized that I couldn't make them the same. So I made this stencil. Once I had the stencil, it was as simple as spacing them and putting them on the limb where I thought they should go. And then what I was doing at first was tracing this line with a razor blade knife and then carving around it and trying to use my knife edge to take all the bark off. But that was so inefficient, I actually brought the piece home and started using a Dremel tool and that's been so much better. I think that a small chisel like a V gouge chisel would work really good. But so does a Dremel tool. I think the deer tracks look pretty good. It's definitely better than the streaks that I usually leave in the cambium, but it took me a day and a half. So with the rest of today, I'm going to try and get these limbs to floor tillering. This is a line at half an inch. I'm just going to try and take my draw knife and rip it down to that line as quickly as possible. Hickory is an incredibly hard wood, but every time I start working with it, I'm reminded that it's an amazing wood to work with because when you pull a sharp draw knife over it, you just end up with these super long ribbons. You could use these as party decorations. We've got a bow blank or a bow shaped object. Now we need to make it bendy. So I've got a string that's too long and then I've got two hooks, one up high and one down low. And I'm going to pull on this string and see how it bends. If I want this to be a 50 pound bow or a 55 pound bow, then I just need to pull on it with 55 pounds of force and keep removing material until it bends smoothly all the way back to my draw length at that weight. It's a very simple, very tedious process. Dang, so far so good. I am shocked at how well that looks so far. This looks incredible. All right, just got to remove these pencil marks. This part wasn't bending at all, so it'd be kind of aggressive. All right, now let's see how that looks. Could definitely put a string on it right now. I think that the left limb is bending a little bit more. So just mark this one more time. I want it bending a little bit more down here. Almost every tree I've ever cut down has some amount of twist and this bow has quite a bit. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to heat it up and clamp it to this table and then use this clamp with the long end and hang weight off of it so that I can twist it back. As it's cooling down, I've got a little weight, another C-clamp hanging off of that long lever. All right, let's check it out. That looks just about perfect. Now I got to do the other side and then we'll recurve it. For my recurving form, I'm trying something new. I drilled a couple of holes and zip tied the end of my bow in instead of using clamps because the clamps don't hold well on a radius like that. And then as you can see, the bow is being weighed by this giant drill bit. It weighs about a pound, maybe one and a half pounds and that'll keep constant pressure on the bow and then I'll just use my heat gun to heat this and it should bend right around that form and then we'll clamp it and just let it cool down. That's the first time I've ever done the hanging weight method and I got to say that it's way better than what I used to do. High five. So I'm just going to pull it back to 50 pounds at 28 inches. The only thing that's happening is that this recurve is coming undone. So this bow is done being tailored. I'll do it one more time. Looks fine. The only thing that's wrong is that this isn't recurved anymore. To fix the problem with the recurve coming uncurled, I added a belly laminate. I chose Osage because I really like that orange color and I thought it would stand out against this hickory. So I split off a thin piece, filed it down until it was flat and then heat bent it around the same form that the hickory was bent on originally. Then I glued it up and clamped it overnight and now I'm just going to shape it. Now this recurve section of the bow is a little bit thicker than the rest of the bow so it shouldn't come uncurled. I don't want the recurves to come unbent as I'm drawing. I want static recurves. This is a moose antler I picked up while I was moose hunting this year and it would be silly to not put some sort of antler on this bow. So I'm just going to cut off one of these tines and make a couple of tip overlays to hold the string in place. These are mostly aesthetic but the string does wear into the wood over time so if I put a little bit of antler on there it makes the bow last quite a bit longer. I shaped the handle and sanded for like 15 years. I also decided to wood burn a moose into one side and a whitetail deer into the other and these are both modeled after my biggest of each species. So when I was 14 years old I watched this guy on tv named Tread Varda and he had a tv show called Hunting the Hard Way and I was so obsessed with that tv show that I wouldn't hunt with anything except for a longbow and it took me four years to get my first deer but it was a nice eight point and that's what this buck is right here that I drew on this side. And then this year I shot the biggest moose of my life so far. It was a 61 inch wide Alaska bull moose and so I did his silhouette on the other side. My whole year and maybe even my whole life revolves around hunting and whitetail deer is what got me into it and moose is the obsession now and what feeds my family so I wanted to make a bow that pays tribute to both of those animals. It's a really sweet bow. It's about 55 pounds at 28 inches. It's probably the fastest bow I've ever made. I'm super happy with how this thing turned out. Thanks for watching. See you guys in the next video.