The Osage Bow Part 2

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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 fellas Dave Canterbury the Pathfinder school I brought my own sage boat back out here now I thought we'd do a little more work on that make a part two on that also and have a short discussion about bows and bow construction in general with you on the white board over here in the classroom have some questions from a young man on my Facebook fan page I kind of want to answer those and maybe I'll give some other people some answers to questions they have as well now we've got the one limb where it till there's a couple three inches now we need to start working on the other limb but I won't keep the camera running through the whole process because you've seen me do this more than once when we get to the tillering part then we'll get the camera on and pay attention to that because it's going to be a little bit of a tricky killer because it's got reflex in two different areas of the limb so stay tuned to stay with me while I'm good time to do one of the things that we're looking at on this bow while we're doing this kind of keep this thing in the right location for you guys we want to kind of bevel this in at the handle area on both sides so we get the shape of the bow that we want and I'll show you more about that on the whiteboard here in a couple minutes but you can see I've got some scribe lines in here that I'm kind of going by and when you do that I want to show you it when you're going this way to take wood off you don't want to go all the way down you want to come back from this side and pick those shavings up because you don't want to splinter it off down and take a big chunk of without here cause you want to keep that curve and the way you do that what you do that is you go inside this way just nibbling out you can see that chip coming off there you see now we don't want that go all the way down so we got to be careful with that then we'll come to the other side and catch again coming the other direction and if we start to get a split there then we'll come in and we'll catch up from the other side we just got to whittle away at it you know it so sage wood is a whole lot harder than the other wood we were working with it's not doing this ox by any means very fast but at the same time it is taking a lot of small chips out of the wood at a time and because of that gives us a little bit of an advantage working up Oh like this because we a little harder to make a giant mistake and we're just going to round this off a little bit and beveling around then we want to come in in a curve on both sides of this handle and I'll show you that on the whiteboard in a few minutes okay so let's stop for just a minute what we're doing and let's talk about bows and bow design all right the basic profile of a bow if you're looking at the top of it it's a couple different ways you can make a bow you can make a bow let's kind of shape like an eye and this would be the front this would be the back or you can make a bow that's shaped more like a D like this this would be the back this will be the front looking down on top of the boat or you can make your bow basically almost oblong but curved just a little bit here and a little bit here so it's a little bit more square back front those are basic profiles that you'd use to make a bow now if you're in the woods and you're making a quick survival type bow like some of the bows that we talked about bow that John Rambo showed you guys the SAS style survival bow what those bows basically do all you really do is you cut a limb that's the size of the bow you want in diameter or a sapling that's two to three inches in diameter and you take that sapling and you just carve away your limbs so to speak so this is what you have this would be the front or the bark side of the bow and this would be the belly and that's exactly the style bow that John Rambo showed you guys how to make a few days ago and that's exactly the style bow basically that we were making the one that we broke except there's a little heavier probably in Diana Dors about a four-inch tree to begin with so they take a lot more off of it and I was planning on making a heavier bow you make survival bows like this you're usually talking probably 30 to 40 pound draw as the best you're going to get out of those if you go thicker you go with a 4 inch diameter tree you can get them up around 4550

for a little while but they're not going to last forever unless are dried out now let's talk about the style of Bo that you're making as far as the profile of the Bo and what that looks like and I had a question on my facebook about this and there's a couple different ways you can do this you can make your bow basically in just a shape like this and then cut these parts out and come in so that your limbs basically are tapered and your handle areas here and this is what you would wrap and you would set the arrow right here on your finger off to the side of your forefinger when you were shooting the bow and you would use your hand for the arrow rest that is a typical Native American style bow the other way to do this is you can take that same bow style basically let's make it a little bit let's make a little bit longer here for demonstration so I can draw this better for you guys I'm no artist by any means let me tell you I've got the same type bow design but what we're going to do is we're going to cut this in a little bit and here we're going to do something look looks like this and then we would wrap this part of the bow and our arrow would be on an arrow rest right here and you only want to cut that shelf in this is your centerline of the bow you don't want that shelf cut into your centerline you want at least an eighth to a quarter inch off center from the bow now when you do something like this you decide you're going to put a narrow shelf in your bow there's certain things that you have to do with the bow that we talked about to begin with they just have the normal shaped handle like this the Indian style bow you can pretty mate and pretty much make that bow flap just like this okay and if you do this and you don't use real hard wood you're going to get what's called a bend in the handle bow which means the handle area of the bow will flex when the bow is drawn that's called a bend in the handle bow if you are going to put a narrow shelf in your bow you cannot have it bending the handle bow you'll break the bow so what you have to do in that case is the profile from the side of your bow has to look more like this and you have to have what's called fades right here and then you can cut your arrow shelf into your bow like I showed you a minute ago and then you can wrap the handle below the arrow shelf and your hand goes in the center of the bow and the arrow rides right above center line just like this okay that's kind of style of bow we're making right now with this Osage orange I don't think I'm going to actually cut a narrow shelf in it but it is going to be a little wider at the handle area because it's going to be about a sixty sixty-five pound bow I'm hoping when I'm done and the heavier poundage draw bow you have a more thickness you needing to handle to keep a lot of hands shock and flex out of the limbs we start shooting 60 pound bows if they bend in the handle you're going to get a lot of hand shock when you shoot that bow

so that's just a quick lesson on designing and types of designs of bows and we're going to go back over here and work on our bow a little bit more now my arms were just about shot from that axe and wear you out but now I'm rested up so let's go back over here and continue on okay guys I want to show you where we're at real quick here just the limb that we were working on we started working on today and you see it's starting to bend now get some flex so the limbs got flex so get to the point we can put her on the tillering tree here and just kind of take a look and see what we're really at the bad thing is now I don't want to I shouldn't say the bad thing but the one thing I want to avoid now is I don't want to over tell her this limb now and end up with a white bow I want this bow to be 60 65 pounds so I'm going to try to stretch this thing on the killing tree just to see what I need to do your I need to go right now it's very very stiff but I think I can get it strung up at least enough with a tillering string to get on the tree and find out where we can start let's do that okay one thing I want to look at real quick before I put this on the tillering tree now that I've put the tillering string on there what I want to look at is I want to see if my string is running truly up the center of my bow from knock and knock it's pretty close remember those limbs were offset left and right and we're basically if you look at the handle area of that bow which is right there you're off the you're off to the right at the bottom and you're off to the left at the top and it follows that from limb to limb so that's pretty good I think we're ready to start looking at tillering this blood sugar you guys something if I can real fast here with this bow I've got this tillering string on it this bow is not anywhere is near ready for the tillering tree yet the reason I know that is because I just put this string in the center of this bow and just trying to draw this string back you can get that boat straighten out and that's it I mean I'm not getting nothing else out of that thing as hard as I can pull that's how strong this Osage is okay this stuff is like iron so we're going to take a lot more meat off these limbs for ready to put this on a Tillery tree okay guys the sooner you get these limbs more important it becomes to be very very careful what you're doing so I'm just nipping away on them very little bit in time looking at the profile as I go turning the boat sideways seeing where I've got more meat on the limb in other places those like this.then already have natural reflex and them are a lot trickier to work as far as the tiller goes

checking all the time looking at it see how it's bending I've got this other limb the one we started on today so we're it's pretty good now it's bending pretty good not perfect by any means but a lot better than it was this limb that we worked on the other days a little thicker still need some meat off of it so that's what I'm working on now so I can get this thing to tillering tree hey guys before we take this bone put on the tillering tree we're going to take our four in one and I'm just going to make sure that all these corners are all these edges are rounded over because a square edge is much weaker than a round edge so I want to make sure that all my edges are rounded off good on the belly and on the back of the bow and once I get that done again that's taking meat off the bow so it's going to weaken the limbs right now it's at a point where I can hardly even draw the thing with no very tight fit with a piece of paracord so it's plenty strong right now but what I'm trying to avoid is I don't want any chance of this thing getting too light so I'd rather it be too heavy for a long time and just take my time getting meat off of it then for it to get too light on a sudden because I get in a hurry so at this point it's all about just taking my time to get it right because Osage will lap

you