The Osage Bow Part 5

Description

http://www.thepathfinderschoolllc.com

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 Dave Canterbury at the path fire school back out here about 8:30 9 o'clock in the morning 21 degrees here in Southeast Ohio beautiful day that's kind of weather I prefer actually it's between about 25 and 35 so it's a little colder than I like it but it's not bad I got gloves in the Hat and I'm good to go I made a regular string for our boat last night I want to talk to you a little bit about this bow you can see that I've almost got this limb is almost straight now and this upper limb has got some curve here and some reflex on this backside if you remember right this limb was reflexed in the middle of the limb and it was also twisted off to one side we've cut part of that out but we still had a little bit of a problem with that so what I did to correct that was I left this both strung overnight now that's not a good thing to do in a general circumstance you don't want to leave a wood bow strung after you've done is shooting it because it will get what's called set in your limbs and your limbs will set in a strong position and you don't want that because then you're gonna lose cast on your bow now in this case it didn't hurt me it actually straightened this limb out so where it's almost perfectly flat now instead of being twisted at all it took a little bit of the reflex on it but still got some in it and we've still got the reflex in this limb now if you remember right from the footage when we were drawing this bow at the end of the last video the upper limb was not bending near as much as the lower limb and also had some questions about why the tips weren't Benny well the tips weren't bending really more because of the reflex because they have to bend this way to even get flat before they could bend this way same thing with this Lynn because it was bent down this way that limb had to bend up this way before it could even start to bend this way so most of your Bend is coming in here now we've still got about a 75-pound bow here I put this thing on the scale at home and looked at it and it was about 76 pounds 75 76 pounds at 28 inches so we still need to take a little bit of weight off this bow I've been using a rough rasp on this boat I'll probably go to a medium file today and I'll remove a little bit of material out of here not much because smoothing this bow out now and getting the rough rasp spots off of it is going to take material away which is going to take weight off the bow and I will end up I want this bone end up close to 70 pounds but I want to also get a little bit better tiller on this upper limb if I can so I'm going to take a little bit more material off of this area yeah after this it looks like when you're holding up it's bent more already but it's just because it's the limb is kind of reflex D flex and so I've got to take a little bit more meat off of here to get this to bend just a little bit more even with the lower lip then we'll be in pretty good shape so let's start by talking about this over on the white board kind of showing you what I'm talking about graphically of why this bones not bending exactly like it should and why it may never Bend perfectly and you know a D style tiller pattern okay so let's talk about this bow for a minute because the actual shape of this stave was a lot like this the upper limb went like this and the lower-limb kind of went like this in the middle um so that's a little bit drastic right there but was it quite that bad it was actually about like this and this being the center line of our bow so with that upper limb and the reason we're not getting the same tiller on it with this one I'm sorry it actually went this way

with this limb all we had to do was get this to bend this direction but it has to straighten out first and then we could get a lot of Bend out of this area of our limb now this one here has to flex it to different spots but straighten out it has 2 flex here and it has 2 flex here just to get a straight line out of it then the whole thing has to bend so you've got different limb dimensions that you're working with and different angles that you're working with and curves on both of these limbs that you're working with are off the bat so it's very hard to get them to tiller exactly the same now I think we can get now what we're looking at now that I have left that bow strung and allowed it to get some string follow on purpose what I really have now is I have a bow that looks more like it's pretty straight here and here's your handle area and then the back of the bow has a little bit of a dip here this has a little bit of reflux in it doing this way right in the middle of the limb right here and most of the reflux in this limb is at the end so we have to straighten this out first before the bow can bend and we have to straighten this out first before the bow can bend so that's what we've got right now so when we pull this this way this has to straighten out and this has to straight now before the bow can bend naturally and right now we've got a fixed spot in its upper limb that's not allowing it to flex the same as the lower limb and that's what we're gonna work on right now

okay the first thing we're going to do this morning is our a string this bow up we'll have to serve this string before we shoot arrows out of it but for sake of tiller we'll be okay now I've made this string so that I've got about three inches right here between the string nock and the bottom eye string when it's pulled tight on the bow and that's about what I want now if that doesn't give me the brace height that I want then I will adjust the string by twisting it down and I'm just using a step through method on this bow stepping through putting the back of the bow or the group of the bow right in the back of my knee pulling the upper limb toward me and stringing it up and that gives me about oh four inches of prey sight I need about five or six so what I'm gonna do for that is I'm going to take this string off I'm gonna pull the back off and I'm gonna twist it down to make the string shorter so I'll show you how I do that real quick I'm just gonna take it back off my nock and now it's part of the reason of smoothing these nock points out a little bit the other day with so I could string it on string this bow a lot easier but I having to pull the string completely off of the bow I can just leave it on the bow this way so I'm gonna slow it down a little bit further here generally this distance is your brace height right here so if this string was tight from here to here my brace light is gonna be that much right so this distance will equal this distance to the string when it's done and that's about when I want something to twist this string down a little bit it might actually be a little bit too long but I don't think it is I think we can twist it down and get away with it you don't want to twist these down too far you're better off shortening the string because the more you twist them the weaker they will become so let's just take this over and what we'll do is I can do it right here acts in front of the camera all I'm going to do is twist this string in the natural direction that twist and now I've got that on the upper limb there I've got that exactly where I want it on the upper limb for my brace height so now I'm just going to twist it down to where this

we'll go right over the top of the end of my bow and it's even once I've twisted it down that far then I know I've got what I want I'll put that over the top of that again and I make these bottom loops a little bit smaller on purpose than my upper loop so it stays tied on there and I make my upper loop a little bit bigger so it can slide up and down the limb so I can leave my string on my bow even when it's sewn stronger so I'll move it down just a little bit more in the limbs so that I can step through it then we'll string it back up again see we wrap okay there we go now we've got a pretty close to proper brace height and we can look at our bow we can tell that this limb is flexing butter than this limb so now we can get our vice our for layout we can actually take some material off of this with our four-way while is strong and watch that limb kind of creep up and try to get our tiller right without putting this on a tiller entry that's what we're gonna do right now now I know that I need to get some more material in this reflection area off of here and now I can watch this limb well I've got strong I can just take the tail off slowly and I can look at it and watch how it's bending and it works almost like its own children tree because I've got too strong to brace light now the true sight and I'll lose a little bit of that grace ice has this limb plexus that's okay now this is where my reflex is that and there's also a knot right there that gives me a little bit of an issue too because it's not going to bend as easy because of that knot right there so I'm trying to kind of bring a little bit off this belly area right here to compensate for that not being there on both sides of it or not on this side as well as the other side and that will help it to bend boy

and I'm just going to take my time with this I'm not getting a rush picking the bow up and looking at it and seeing how it's bending as I go take a little bit more off below that knot now try to bring that tip up this is slow process you just have to take your time with it do want to show you something real quick just a little just a little trick you've got one of these serving jigs like this you remember when we served this last string that we made on a tree we wrapped it around by hand one wrap at a time with the serving jig but I told you if you have this thing on a bow you can make it a little easier on that and all you really have to do is start the thing winding and bouncing just like this and it'll sell find all the way down the bow for you and it makes it a whole lot faster that way you see I've got you know that much serving on there no time at all okay let's see where we're at here guys that's not too bad you know I think I'm gonna call that good for the moment I got a little bit of a problem today I had to go get six shots yesterday for overseas travel in my shoulders are a little bit slower than I expected them to be in having problems drawing this bow back to full draw and I don't want to take too much off of it and over tiller it because my shoulder is sore so I want to kind of wait I think until tomorrow and see what my chiller looks like but it looks pretty good on the bow right now when I pulled it up with two hands it looked pretty good I haven't been able to shoot an arrow through it yet cuz I can't pull it back to full draw this morning but now we've got to do some final sanding on here that's gonna take a little bit of weight off of it anyway so I think for now I think we're gonna call that tiller good and we actually have a sheet of a bow right now without a doubt but if we want to really make this boat look nice we're gonna have to sand all of this down and then we're going to have to finish it later so we'll stand all this down smooth again our knocks ain't as smooth and all of that and put some sealer on it to keep it from drying out and cracking on us we'll put some tung oil on here and get it set up like that and we'll be back tomorrow hopefully to shoot this bow and work on a little bit more

I appreciate you guys joining me for this video my name is Dave camera at the Pathfinder school

I appreciate your views and I appreciate your support thank you very much