Advice for Beginners

There is a Primitive Bowmaking Group on Facebook and the same questions keep getting asked,

1. What's the best wood?
2. What tools do I need?
3. Can you recommend some books?
4. Can you give me some general advice/pointers?

1. Almost any wood will make a bow, maybe only a low poundage one, but just getting any wood that is relatively straight and knot free will allow you to start. Season the wood, ideally for a year, but 30 days somewhere warm, dry and airy will do for some firsts attempts.
 The sooner you start, the sooner you will gain experience and understanding. As kids many of us make stick bows, they work at least for a while and they provide some foundation in understanding how bows work and how they fail. A more specific answer depends on where you are in the world. In the UK I recommend Hazel as it is plentiful, straight, knot free and easily worked.
Personally I don't make board bows, but for some who don't have access to staves, that is the way to go.

2. You can start with just an axe! A draw knife, spokeshave, a big rasp (farriers rasp), a tape measure/rule and some string . Some way of holding the work securely helps, a bench with a vice and a support which can be clamped to the other end of the bench is good, or a shave horse. A tillering rig is IMO vital, ideally with a spring balance/luggage scale or some weighing device and a pulley and rope so you can watch the bow as you flex it. Details and pictures of all this stuff is elsewhere on this blog...
I've included a pencil in the tools... you can't do too much damage with a pencil!
A cabinet scraper is handy too, but that is more of a finishing tool (or at least that's how it's used in the UK... they tend use 'em for heavier use in the USA)
Note:- New tools generally need to be sharpened and/or adjusted (cheap tools can be good if you do that)

3. There is almost too much choice. The Traditional Bowyers Bible vol 1 is very good (the others are probably for later). There is plenty on Youtube too, some better than others. My channel  is Del Cat, (it didn't have adverts at the start of the vids until Youtube got greedy and put them on there without me "monetizing" the chanel!) (note once on that channel you can search for topics that a general youtube search would miss). There are build-along play lists for a variety of bows.



4. General advice.
The sooner you start, the sooner you will gain experience.
Two of the hardest skills are "getting your eye in" to be able to see the curve of the bow, and learning how much wood to remove to achieve a desired result.
If you want to rush at it, do it early! It's easy to loose patience later in the process at exactly the point you should be slowing down!
You should spend as much time looking and thinking as you do removing wood. It is not a race.... slow down... enjoy the process.
Beginners usually want to make too high a poundage from a stave that is too short.
Leave your bow at least 2" longer than you want... you can always cut it shorter later on. Start with at least 62" (or 74" for an English longbow).
Have a target draw weight and draw length... a cheap luggage scale will weigh up to 50# and accurately.
We often see pictures of bows flexing very slightly at either an unknown poundage or say 30# and asking for a critique, when there isn't enough bend to see, and no information about draw weight.
If you want a 40# bow (a good weight to aim for)... you must pull it to 40# (unless you see a problem, like an uneven bend).
Each stroke with a tool should have a purpose, so you need to look and see if it has achieved that... it's easy to watch one edge of a stave as you are shaving it down and forget the other side... only to find that side is now too thin because the stave wasn't even thickness right across.
A final word:-
Keep it simple. Please don't try fancy recurves until you have made a good few decent bows. 

Elm Bow Repair

 One of the guys at the club noticed a splinter lifting on the back of his Elm bow once he'd braced it
... now this bow was originally about 100# but that was back in August 2015 so it's had a pretty good innings and has been through a few different hands.
I brought it back, and unstrung the splinter is barely visible, Elm has "interlocking grain" as shown by the fact that it's a pig to split with axe and wedges, so hopefully the crack won't propagate too far if glued and bound up. You can actually see the run of the grain seems to be diagonally across the back, which would have caused some woods to have failed in the tillering.

Anyhow, I won't know how it holds up until he tries it out... I'm not going to put it on the tiller (or maybe I will..).
It's taken a fair bit of set over the years and is now probably at about 80# . It just needs a wipe of Danish oil and some beeswax polish to finish the repair.

Lever Bow Test... lessons learned

 Working on the lighter weight lever bow showed up some really useful points.
Best to watch this Youtube video first to understand what I'm going on about!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arsk7Kt4vXM

1. Before the string lifts off the levers the bow acts as a short bow with no levers... thus:-
2. The bow, without the levers, needs to be able to be braced and drawn up to the point when you want the string to lift off the levers, This has several benefits.
a) Temporary nock grooves will also come in handy when trying to string the finished bow.
b) The bow is much easier to handle, work on and tiller without the levers.
c) It can be tillered to the desired draw weight and length required at the point string is required to lift off the string bridges.

3. The levers need to have sufficient width to allow string line tracking/adjustment and will probably need guides/bridges to ensure the string is guided correctly onto the levers as the bow is loosed or let down. They also need to be constructed so that they can be shimmed out or rasped to adjust the angle/draw length at which the string lifts.
Note:- they don't need to be very bulky in their finished state, not really any bigger than the tips of a 100# Warbow. The levers on many commercial "horsebows" are ludicrously bulky, mainly because they are made from straight grained timber for reasons of cost!
4. The ratio of lever length to limb length will probably determine the ratio of draw weight per inch once the string has lifted vs when it hasn't.
5. Before proceeding with the heavy bow, I need to have a target draw weight/length for both before and after the string lifts.
You can see in the force draw curve, the string maybe lifts off a bit late? This test bow is too light but if I interpolate the graph to continue without the string lifting off it would probably be 54# @ 28" rather than the 43# @28" which it actually is... Now if we just double those figure, that would give 108# without levers, which I couldn't manage, vs 86# @ 28" with levers which I could ! If the levers lifted a tad earlier, that could come down to a nice manageable 80# @28".
Anyhow, I hope that makes some sort of sense and gives an idea how and why it's a good idea to experiment rather than just diving in and hoping!

Boo, Hickory, Boo

 One of the guys at the club, Don, wanted me to have a look at a bow he'd been making, he's new to bow making and had got a bit lost, not knowing how to proceed.
He'd done a good job of the glue up and had sensibly made it very long 79". I think he'd rounded the belly too much and put some horn nocks on it, not sure if he'd actually had it on the tiller much, but it had taken a little set, so presumably he had.

The taper in the outer 1/3 wasn't really there which contributed to the weak points where the set was.
Anyway, I videoed it on the tiller, and the lower limb was weak, however sawing 4" off that and marking a new centre restored some balance. It was just a matter of tapering the outers and easing off the rather stiff inner limbs. Removing material from the belly almost took me down to the Hickory core, anyhow, it turned out Ok and made just shy of 50# @28".
Videos here:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKb7GIVUrAY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SPt7j3Rao8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfQSsqA91QI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWaoAUhddzI

Shooting Again!

 

I went over to Boyton Cross for a bit of roving with the gents. I took the recently finished reflexed Walnut bow, as it's not too heavy and I want to see how it performed. The first 3 shots were impressive but on the 4th it went BANG spectacularly.
A very symmetrical break, about 10" either side of the grip.  I suspect the sapwood broke where there is a small knot, but there are also some slight compression cracks showing so maybe the belly collapsed. It's hard to know without some really high speed video.
One of the guy lent me a bow to shoot, it was one made of Yew billets that I'd made for him some time back so it was good to shoot it again... mind I

was understandably nervous at full draw each time I shot!
It was brilliant to get out shooting again, a bit nippy, but some sunshine and good company, plenty of skylarks on the field too.

Stuff and a little progress

 

I got the Yew heartwood backed with bamboo and glued up with about 1 3/4" of deflex. I've cut in temporary nocks on the sides so I can see how it flexes. I've pulled it to about 110# with the tips barely coming back to brace. Bearing in mind that if I add 10" levers to each end, that will substantially reduce the poundage... I'm not sure how to accurately calculate it, but if I assume a 20" working limb and a 10"

lever, that will give me some idea,  so 110 should become about 73# 2/3. Another guestimate would be that removing an inch off each end of a bow gains 5#... so presumably adding an inch reduces poundage by 5#... so 10" should take off 50# which would give 60#.
So maybe it would become somewhere between 60 and 73#. Of course it was only pulling back a few extra inches on the long string, so I can loose some weight, which is fine especially as there is some pith showing on the belly which would be nice to get past. This is only very early in the build, so I have plenty of bulk to play with!

Meanwhile I'v had to change the 3-way valve in the central heating, as the radiators were getting hot even when the thermostat was turned right down (the water should only be going to the heat the hot water supply, but it was going to the radiators as well). Now I  can fit a new one without draining the system, as I have appropriate shut off valves, but I still needed to move a lot of stuff, including my little milling machine... well, to be honest, I didn't really, but I thought it was a good idea to flush out the hater heating coil in the hot water cylinder, as that had got clogged up before. A rather messy job, but worth doing, even if it just reassured me that it wasn't too clogged. I also cleaned out the magnetic sludge catcher, which certainly needed cleaning. So a job well done, and it gave me some much needed exercise.
I've also been repairing the Deer sculpture that I made my wife 15 years ago for a "big" birthday... doesn't seem possible that it's that long ago, mind it's stood up to the weather quite well.