OK - Partially kidding. Anyway I finally was able today to start on the very nice Osage stave that friend Mike Brooks found for me to learn on. I really enjoyed it. I had seen it before, and Mike sowed me very basically how to start out with the Draw Knife. Today we got serious and I really started learning what, why, and how to proceed. These will not be quick lessons as we can only get together every so often (like next weekend I'll be on a trad shoot). So this may be a long drawn out process but suffice to say after this first half day I would love to lay into it every day until I finished a bow or the stave beat me into the ground. Mike does the teaching and observing, I provide the elbo grease and do the learning, I hope - I learned a lot today - IMO. Here are some pics of the stave and my beginnings, for those interested.
Here you can see the stave has some nice natural setback or deflex starting out:
In this one, you can see the little patch of cuttings at stave center from when I first took the Draw knife in hand for an intro, some time back:
Here you can see that I am lucky enough to have pretty wide Growth rings and new growth areas revealed. We felt I stood a good chance of using the first clean (actually the second one, I guess) growth ring and we proceeded with that assumption:
Here are a couple of shots of my first attempts at Chasing a ring on an osage stave. Got just about half of the back nicely exposed this afternoon (I'm a slow, hopefully methodical worker - LOL:
Finally, here are the shavings from my first day attacking this poor unsuspecting, and (I feel) beautiful stave. Hope you enjoyed my first halting steps on a selfbow:
