When building a selfbow from a natural bow stave split from a tree you’ll inevitably be dealing with the characteristics inherent in that stave. Figuring out how to bring a longbow or recurve to life from natural materials is one of the fascinating aspects of bow and arrow building. One common bow building problems is working with a stave that might not be large enough or deep enough to build the kind of bow handle or riser that we want. These thin staves are an inevitable result of harvesting your own bow wood. Rather than dismissing them as only good for kids bows, or perhaps a bendy handle D bow design, let’s take a look at how to build up the riser section so we’ll have enough wood to work with.
In this video Clay shows how to build up the bow stave riser section by laminating another block of wood onto the stave. Clay uses a belt sander to flatten both the stave and extra wood, making sure that both surfaces are perfectly flat to ensure a thin glue line. If you don’t have a belt sander you could glue some 50 grit sandpaper to a board and use that to flatten the pieces. To make it easier to flatten the riser section, some of the wood should be removed from the belly side of the limbs so the riser is above them. This will make more sense in the video. That way only the riser comes in contact with the sander which makes it easier to flatten. This method also works great for building up the riser for a stiff handle on a board bow. Clay uses titebond 3 wood glue to glue up the riser on this bow. This is a very tough and water resistant wood glue.
If you’ve read through this post I’ll assume you’re interested in bow building. If you want to significantly cut the learning curve for building great performing bows of natural materials, please consider signing up for the Patreon site. For just a few bucks a month you’ll get access to hours of excluseive content that covers all aspects of bow building. Just a few of the topics covered there include:
Tips for chasing a ring on osage
Bows from Whitewoods (hickory)
Making a takedown bow
Making recurves
Heat Treating
Bow layout
I don’t have the tool or some kind of the right machine to build my own bow. The video surely will help me a lot in the future. But I wonder if that possible to build a bow from natural resources? What I mean without a tool and machine.
Let’s say you accidentally lost into the wood and you need to survive on your own. Is there any specific guide or maybe some tree branch we could find and for the string, maybe there is a tree/plant that can provide the same as for the bow properties. Then build the own arrow by carving some stone or the branch of the tree itself.
That would be interesting, something like 101 survival skill, building your own bow with the natural material. I know it sounds like a movie and it’s hard in a real situation.
Anyway, thanks for the tips and also step by step guide to building selfbow. This is my first time to comment here. I enjoyed reading your blog.
Certainly, you could use stone tools to build a bow in a primitive survival situation. I did a YouTube series showing how to build a red cedar bow with nothing but a knife.