Hello all. My wife and friends have threatened to muzzle me if I mention anything about bows, wood, trees, or tools to work them. All I hear is "I don't care what kind of tree that is or what kind of bow it could make." I decided it was high time to find others that spoke my language.
I don't consider myself new to the board seeing as how it's been a wonderful teacher for nearly a year now. I still feel the need to introduce myself as new because I've been silent until now. I'll give a brief background for the sake of character development.
I'm an artist/ creator both professionally and privately. I love learning new skills and taking on interesting projects . About a year ago my oldest daughter expressed an interest in archery after watching me practice with my compound(dirty word, sorry). I decided to make her a pvc bow after watching a tutorial video. From the video, the pvc bow's performance seemed equivalent to the youth fiberglass bows most of us learned on. It was surprisingly strong and easy to make. I ended up making a 45# one for myself the same day. After I made about 20 or so pvc bows I decided to go for a wood one. How much different could it be, right? I broke the first six. My old way of learning, acquire a basic knowledge and try it until you succeed, didn't seem to be working in this case. More research and mostly patience led me to a successful oak board bow. It has never taken me 7 tries to get something right, ever. I found that difficulty strangely irresistible and was hooked from there. I even gave up watching television because I'd rather break wood in the basement. I have two full racks of wooden bows I've made thus far (10 give or take), with 30+ staves in the rafters waiting their turn.
I've all but retired the compound, though I still take the x-bow out hunting simply because it's good at making clean kills. Primitive shooting is fun, but I don't think I'm ready to risk wounding an animal. I hope to make my first traditional harvest next year after a summer of practice with a hornbeam billet bow that started as an experiment. I thought it was destined to fail, but it decided to do the opposite and out perform all my others. It had a 90 degree bend and quickly rounded back to straight. I was running low on good wood to work with so I started messing with the billets. I was flipping them around seeing if I could get it to work somehow and all of a sudden it just looked right.
I know it looks way out of whack, but the tiller was even and shoots like a champ. I can see in hind sight the handle has quite a different plane than the limbs, but it doesn't seem to matter when it comes to shooting. It's far from the prettiest bow I've made, but pretty can't fill my belly.
Aside from the introduction I would also like to thank all of those who have shared their knowledge with the world via this site. This is knowledge that must be preserved.
