Bow Making Hand Tools | what you NEED and what you DON'T (Tillering Course ep 2)

You've clicked on the second video of a tillering course I built out for an exclusive paid membership, but that's changed. I wanted to release this to you for free. So if you want to support me in this free content, go to shadowproofarchery.com to get your bow making, your archery needs, everything like that. With that being said, let's jump into the second tillering video and go make the best bow you can. One of my favorite things about bow making is it doesn't take much to get started. I started building bows in the garage of my parents' house when I was young, and we didn't have a lot of tools. I had a draw knife and a file. I think that was it when I started. Oh, and a pocket knife. I did have a pocket knife. From there, when I moved into an apartment, when I moved out, I built bows in the apartment on the floor of the apartment. And I want to talk to you about the hand tools that you need to get started. So in my opinion, you can build bows anywhere. Build it on the floor of an apartment and vacuum up the dust. It's not a lot of wood removal. It's more of an art. It's more of a technique. It's more of bringing down the wood slowly to specific thicknesses so that the bow bends correctly. So you don't need a lot of tools. I'm going to break down the basic hand tools right now that you might want when starting to bow make. So you may have everything here. You may have a ton of power tools. We're covering power tools next, but for now we're going to break down basic hand tools. If you had zero tools and you wanted to make your first bow, I'm going to show you what I would start off getting. The first tool I want to talk about is a draw knife. This is very, very nice when making, let's say, an Osage bow from a stave, a live stave. If you're going to take a stave, you can carve the bark down. You can carve limbs down really well with this. My suggestion on this, if you're going cheap, go to a garage sale, a flea market, something like this, and you can find these and get a great deal on them. A nice one will run you around $100 and a cheap one will run you $15, but I found you can get a $100 one that's nice and old, good steel for $15 if you go hunting for it. You could use this in so many ways. You could use it as a scraper if you wanted to. You can use it just as a wood removal tool, but a draw knife is not a must, but it's very helpful, especially if you're using staves, and what I mean by that is a log that might have bark on it if you're doing a hickory flat bow or an Osage bow, or if you cut down the tree, let it dry, and then are using it from there. That's when the draw knife really shines. If you're building a board bow, I may skip this. The next tool would be a rasp, and for hand tools, this is super good. Now, equivalent to this might be a belt sander or a spindle sander, but this just has deep teeth in it so that you can remove wood primarily used in the handle section. When removing wood from the handle, you wanna shape that so it feels good. This is aggressive, but not so aggressive you mess up, so control matters a lot. This tool gives you a lot of control when building bows by hand. As far as rasp goes, Nicholson 49R50 is very good. They're more expensive rasp. If you want something cheaper, you might be able to find a farrier's rasp cheaper, but I like a coarse rasp, and then also a fine rasp. If you have one of each, you can get a lot done. A nice rasp does go a long way. Again, if you're going into a flea market or something, you could probably pick up both of these for under $20, and bare minimum, you could do a whole bow with a draw knife and a rasp if you wanted to. Go down to a smoother, let's say, file, and this is just, for me, really nice to go in between the rasp and sandpaper, just a middle ground. If you're going from a rasp to sandpaper, it can take a long time to remove all the marks, but the file is kind of the middle ground there and can be really handy around the string grooves, or this also can be really handy around the handle. Next will be a chainsaw file. These are really cheap, and this is primarily just for the string grooves on either end. A normal chainsaw file is the same width that your bowstring will be, or very close to it, and so it works out really, really well. Hacksaw, hacksaw blade. I just chose a plain hacksaw blade because you can use this, just a saw. Basically, I'm going to use the hacksaw blade to cut in the arrow rest, and that's pretty much it. Scraper. Out of all the tools here, this is what I would say is the most handy. I picked this one up for $6 on Amazon. So, you don't really have to spend a lot of money on a scraper, but if you can sharpen them with sandpaper or a whetstone or a diamond stone, I'll cover that in a minute. They can last you a really long time. I've been using this one for about 10 years now, and I just re-sharpen it, and it works great. And lastly, but this one's more optional, is going to be some sort of chisel. The chisel can be really handy to take off some wood on the fade-out sections. You can use the hacksaw blade and then grab the chisel to chisel away the wood, and to step that down nicely with hand tools. That works pretty well. You can also do that on the limb width to thin down the limb width. So, a chisel does come in handy. I also use it to carve out around the string grooves, how I like it to look. So, the chisel can be handy. I don't think it's a necessity, but if you have one laying around, I might grab it because you will use it. And lastly, something to measure with is really nice. So, this is a few bare minimum tools. If I had to pick three to make a bow, I'm going to choose the scraper, a rasp, and a draw knife, and you can get it done like that. On YouTube, I made a video where I bought all the tools and materials to make a bow for under $50. It was based upon a comment someone had commented, and I built that entire bow basically with razor blades. So, it can be done. If you really, really want to make it happen, you could do it. So, to sharpen a scraper, basically you need something abrasive, and that could be from a diamond stone to a wet stone to simply just a piece of sandpaper. I guess technically you could probably do it on a rock or at an edge of a piece of glass or something like that. A way a scraper works is differently than a knife in a couple ways. A knife, you're going to have two points coming together here, and then you want to create a burr, roll the burr over, roll the burr back, roll the burr back until that gets smaller and smaller, and you get a real fine edge. On a scraper, we've got a 90. So, two burrs are going to happen, one on either side of the 90. We're going to roll that burr over, and then we're going to flatten it out, roll that burr over, flatten it out, and then roll it over one more time, and then at that point, you're going to cut with that burr. So, with a diamond stone like this, I'm just going to lay it flat, and go back and forth. After you do that for a while, you're going to create a burr right here, and you can actually feel it with your hands. If you're having a hard time feeling the burr, get your hands wet a little bit with some water, and that makes your fingertips, I don't know if it makes it swell or exactly what happens, but when your hands are wet, you have more feeling, and you can feel that fine burr, which I can right there. So, I've created that burr, so I'll flatten it out on this side, and on this side, and to refine it, I'll turn it back, and I'll create another burr. And once you have that burr, you're good to use this as a scraper, but if you don't have a diamond stone or a wet stone, you can use sandpaper. Put the sandpaper on the flattest surface you have, so if you have a piece of glass laying around, a piece of granite, maybe even a countertop, anything like that, lay that down, and I like to sometimes get the sandpaper wet, and you just do the same process. Even a flat piece of wood will work okay, so like this tabletop is MDF, you could use that and probably get a pretty good result. I would just use probably a 250 or 400 grit sandpaper, and it's gonna be good enough for bow making. Scraper is probably my favorite tool in bow making. I use it from my primitive Osage bows all the way up to fiberglass bows. The last tool that's not here is gonna be something to clamp the bow down. So if you have a vise, thumbs up, you're good to go. I would just maybe put some leather on either side of the vise or some foam or something, if you have any soft jaws, that sort of thing. It's gonna help you out to keep from marring the bow or getting nicks in it. Another option is gonna be some sort of clamp. Just on the tabletop, you can clamp your bow down, and you'll be good to go there. I have built a few bows back in the apartment days without a clamp or a vise, and just holding it against the ground or holding it on my leg or sitting in a chair some way, you can figure out a way to prop up your bow to scrape material off. That is hard, and I think it's well worth it to find some sort of vise or clamp to build bows. But do what you have to. Again, there's no rules, find what works for you. ♪ Bo, bo, bo ♪