Good Job, Cody! Your Mulberry Bow
from Your Build-Along Project is Now Self Bow of the Month for November
From Cody and his dad, Justin: The bow is 68" mulberry that Cody cut last fall. He even split the log himself. A lot of work for a 10 year old. It had a lot of sapwood on it so we used the band saw to remove the sapwood. I let him do all the cutting, I just didn't get far from the kill switch. I did spell him off for a while when he was using the draw knife to remove the rest of the sapwood and chase a ring. I even gave him one of the pieces of banding that Pappy let me have. He filed and sharpened it and made himself a scraper. He then sealed the back with glue. I helped him with the dimensions, and he laid out the bow. I helped him cut out the profile so he didn't loose all his hard work.
First thing on the agenda today was to rasp the stave and clean it up. Then he used heat flatten the limb in a couple of places. I don't know if you can see it very well, but there was about 15-20 degrees of propeller in each limb. Cody heated the limb, and I helped him with the clamping. I showed Cody all the different colors of wood, the different types and color of horn, and the different antlers that I have for nocks. No big shock, Cody wanted buffalo horn. I would have picked the same when I was his age. He cut the overlays from a horn that I had cut the tips off and sent to someone. Then he sanded and shaped them with the belt sander. He glued them on with TB 3 and used a rat tail file to cut in the string grooves. After applying gpher snakeskins and cutting tip overlays.
This bow got lots of praise part of which was due to the special father/son project:"Great looking Bow Cody,I had faith in you.Looks great." - Pappy
"Excellant bow.Love the snake skins and the grip.Thats a tough looking bow,you should be very proud.Now you can get started on some small game.Thanks for shareing guys." tradrick
"You done good, Cody. Great looking bow." -Hillbilly[attachment deleted by admin]
