Hawthorn Log

I've been roughing out a big old Hawthon log which I cut in April 2009, It was lying across a footpath, still attached at the root, so it wasn't dead. Cutting it helped clear the path, I don't know if the wood will be any good as it has split a fair bit. It's nicely dried to a warm Yellowish colour, the grain isn't very striking and looks a bit like Maple in parts.
I didn't have the band saw when I got the wood so I just chopped away some of the worst half and attacked it with a power planer.
Here are some pics, I still don't know if there's a bow in there yet, but at least it's manageable now.

I've tried to saw it following the curve of the grain which is pretty wild. The end result is quite promising for a bow with some natural recurve, there are still some splits and weird sworls in the grain so there is a fair bit of pondering to do.
The stave is 78" long so there's some room to find a nice 65" flatbow of some sort.

The pictures are all of the Hawthorn in it's various stages of being worked, you can see some of the splits and turns in the grain.



I've also done a bit on the Yew longbow stave to get it closer to it's final dimensions, I've taken measurements of my 75lb Yew bow at 12" intervals along the limb and transferred those onto the new stave, I've used a plane to get it roughly down to those dimensions (plus a mm or so for good measure) fairly square in cross section. It should finish seasoning quickly now, I'm trying to avoid the temptation to do too much to it until September, which is why I've been playing with the Hawthorn.