shag bark hickory?

[blackhawk]

Canuck...none of the above 

I boilled the tips and bent them over a wooden form I made. I basically traced the circle of a 5 gallon bucket on a 2x6 and cut it out and sanded/planed her down to a nice smooth nontwisting arc. I feel the need to boil tips going more than 45 degrees,and my bow stave was cut a week earlier. Its best and easiest to bend large and severe angle recurves when the woods still really wet and green. With the whitewoods leave it in your form for 24 hours to be safe. I just bent up some 70 degrees statics on a elm stave I cut last fri eve. I cut, split,and roughed a stave down to rough bow dim fri eve then bent one tip sat then bent the other on sun. Fun stuff watching wood bend like a noodle. 

[sadiejane]

thanks for the  info on forming those tis.

soooo...
i have another questions about the hickory
ive read where i could and looked at lots of pix of hickory bows.
appears to me that most(if not all) are done similar to yew. in that the sapwood is the back?
am i right?
or is there ring chasing to be done?
thanks again for all your help
this is gonna be fun!
been wanting to try some other woods.
so far ive only made bows from osage

[Cacatch]

Here's my only input on Shaggybark - it tends to have more knots than other types of hickory I've experienced and if you split the cut log right away you will tend to have more side to side warping as the split staves dry, even if you seal them well. As they dry they will want to warp a little where there are knots. I've cut Shaggybark before and split into halves, that were straight when I split them, only to come back months later to see them crooked. It's not really bad, you can usually work with it, just a good thing to know as you select a tree or trees. Do yourself a favor and try to avoid knots and if you can stand the wait let the whole log sit a few months before splitting. Other than that, I LOVE hickory, and if you've got access to all that consider yourself lucky 

CP

[blackhawk]

Peel the bark n some cambium and that's the back. And the whole bow will prob b all sapwood,depending on what diameter tree you cut. The cambium is pink. You'll see. It'll show itself where you didn't remove it from the white sapwood by turning color a minute or so after the" air" hits it.