Survival Bow Making(Making a Bow String)

Description

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Tags: Pathfinder,Survival,Bug Out,Bushcraft,Scouts,Scouting,Primitive,Primitive Skills.Traditional,Archery,Bone,Stone,Tools,Self Reliance,Navigation,Orienteering,Tracking,Trekking,Camping,Backpacking,Hiking,Tents,Campfire,Fire,Wool Blanket,Kit,Emergency Preparedness,Spear,Hunting,Cooking,Fishing,Game Cleaning,Meat preservation,Nature,Naturalist,Trapping,Traps,Primitive Traps,Handdrill,Bowdrill

Video Transcription

morning I'm Dave camera at the path fire school back out here at our camp going to do a little bit more work on our bow today a little bit more of a decent day today it's just cold about 23 degrees that's my favorite kind of weather but uh

sunshine we're going to get a fire started we're going to dry this bow out some today and see if we can't get a better color on our limbs and we'll work with that a little bit as we're drying the bow out I want to show you how you can kind of force draw your bow a little bit to make it to give it a better flex in the end and we may try to put some reflux in this boat while we're at it so stay with me today guys all right so what we're going to do now is we just got this bow propped up in a Y branch here in the backside of it's propped up in another Y branch and we're just heating these limbs to slow drying now and get the moisture out of them we have a crack in the bottom limb I saw this morning

that I didn't see before today so we're going to have to contend with that other than scrap this bow or rather than scrap this whole bow I'm going to try to do a repair on that lower limb and hope it holds up I've got repairs that have held up for years

but I'll probably try to do something very quickly quickly in this video like use duct tape recorded for a quick repair not having pine pitch or anything with me right now I'll probably end up using some kind of cordage or duct tape to affect that repair and we'll talk about that and we'll obviously see what that looks like on the tillering tree as we finish up this bow okay I'm just keeping fuel to this fire keeping a low flame and moving the limb back and forth from the fade to the tip over top of this fire about 10 minutes at a time back and forth just to kind of dry this out a little bit give us a little bit more power after we shoot the bow and the bow reflexes if the woods wet that's where you lose power the woods dry you'll get better reflux out of the wood well guys our crack turned into a broken bow so now all we can do start over the bow is a little longer we might have been able to get it with just cutting it off a bit and going from there but I suppose too short to do that with so we're going to be starting over so lesson learned times start to show you guys something real quick I broke that bow that we were working on so we're going to start again but what I wanted to do while I was out here today was I do have another piece of Bush honeysuckle right here that I've been drying and it's just going to make like a stick bow and it probably won't be more than thirty thirty-five pounds at the most but I'm going to leave it laying aside for now I want to show you how to make a quick bow string in the woods not a fancy Flemish string just a quick bow string you can do this with any kind of material as long as you know what the breaking strength of a single strand is so you know how many strands yet put together so what I've done is I've cut and this string will be just being when I can put my backpack and carry with me from when I make another bow and I can use it multiple times so I've got a piece of here that's about o close to seven feet long and this one happens to be be 50 string and I've cut seven strands and I've got seven strands already cut in another bundle like this and I want to show you it's kind of like making cordage how you make a quick bow string and I want to show you how to do that in pretty fast fashion here so hang tight okay now all I did was I took this bundle and I just wrapped it over a branch above my head and this stuff's kind of sticky because it's waxed anyway and you could tie a knot in there if you had to but you're going to lose some of your length if you do that so if you're going to tie a knot in it you want to tie it as short and not as you possibly can so I'm going to tie real short not in this thing and then I'm just going to come back and pull it back toward me and what I'm going to do is I'm going to stretch that thing completely out and I'm just going to start twisting it toward me I'm going to twist the whole thing toward me just like I would normal court egde until it gets tight and I want to twist it until it almost wants to turn on itself like normal cordage would if we were making single strand cordage I want to turn it to or when I like you see how it's twisting up by itself like that that's what I want but I don't want to twist up so I'm going to leave it lay then I'm going to tie the other piece on there in exactly the same place up there which is my other bundled strand here bundle of three and I'm going to tie it up right next to that and as short as not as I can and I'm going to do exactly the same thing if I twisted that bundle toward myself then I'm going to twist this bundle toward myself until it knocks up just like that

doesn't take a real long time to do this and twist it down again pulling it a little bit stretching it as I go and I want to twist it to the point where when I put it up in the air like this it tries to twist up on itself again I think you can see that let me back this camera out just a little bit you can see where it's trying to twist up on itself I'm going to pull that twist out of it and just lay it on the ground now I've got two of these that are twisting in the same direction or both twisting toward me okay now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take both of those strands and I'm gonna come down to the other end and show you what I'm going to do with that from there okay now I'm just going to take both of these ends and pull them out even it's like this I'm going to come all the way out to the end of them out here and I'm going to tie them around I'm not even gonna nod it really I just want to twist them around there and hold it and then what I'm going to do is with this I'm going to twist it these are twisted toward me both of these so I'm going to twist this whole thing away from me just like this and I'm going to do the same thing making it tight now if you put this on a flat piece of wood like card where you could turn it in your hand and twist the whole thing then it becomes really fast but to do it by hand it doesn't really take that long and I want to twist that all the way down until again until it gets tight keeping it pulled taut while I do it so that doesn't come unwound at all the other direction because really what I'm doing now is I'm making a piece of cordage I'm just not finger twisting it I'm twisting it in a long link like this and I'll hold on to that and pull as tight as I possibly can while I'm doing it I'll stretch it out and pull it and twist it down I want to twist this down again to the point where it's about ready to turn over on itself when I let go of it it's not quite to that point yeah but it's getting close so I don't have enough twists in it yet so I'm going to keep twisting up my hand and like I said you can do this a lot faster if you have this on a card but this doesn't work too bad either now when I get down to the point where I've got it pretty well twisted I'm going to go ahead and pull it off of the stick which basically was just holding the bundles together I'm going to twist it by hand

when I get twisted down pretty good to work sorting to wrap like that on itself then I'm going to pull it out I'm just going to tie knot in the end of the cordage

it's like this pull a good knot in it and I'll do the same thing I'll just cut this off up the top with my knife and I'll tie in a knot and now basically what I have is I have a double ended piece of cordage here that I can use for a bow string now the best thing I can do for myself at this point is to take this and make one end of it a small loop and then I use the other end just to tie off in like a timber hitch so if I take this and just tie it over one more time into a small loop like this and that knot will help that lock in place now I've got a loop on one end of it that I can use on my bow and the other end will just be a freehand tie timber hitch in the end and I'll just trim it up so the links are pretty close on my Pathfinder knife

now I can take my lighter and I can burn this because I use this be 50 I can melt this a little bit it's like that you can see that mushroom melt together like that now I know it's not going to come undone I go down to the other end and do the same thing right there it might not blow it out let it mushroom in there and be good now I've got a bow string that I can actually use and I can use it over and over again when I make bows in the woods and if I just carry this string and I can make pretty quick bows I'm not making one to keep forever and I can just keep this in my pack and I have a bow string at hand all the time guys we didn't get a whole lot done today we broke one of the limbs on that bow that we were working on I did get a chance to show you how to make a quick bow string and like I said you can use even hip twine to make a bow string with you just have to understand what the breaking strength is of one strand so that you can multiply your strands to make a decent bow string I hope you enjoyed this lesson on making a quick bow string in the woods and a string that you can take with you to use on multiple bows I apologize in fact that we broke our boat we'll start another one that's what it's all about it's what learning is all about actually that bow broke in a spot I didn't expect it to break I thought I was going to break somewhere in the hinge or somewhere on the limb that had a knot it actually broke down toward the bottom of the limb so I must have had a tooth in in one area and didn't realize it it didn't show up during the tiller probably because it was wet and once we dried it out and split and cracked on us so I apologize for that but I appreciate your support

I appreciate your views and it's good to show failures as well as showing you know making things look easy because if you see failures that you know that everybody fails I fail all the time but I learned something every time I fail so I'll study this bow and look at it real good and see what I did wrong and the next time hopefully I will make that mistake so we'll see in the next video thank you very much