Reflexing an osage orange bow with heat!

It is a beautiful day in the workshop. Thank you for joining me today. It is awesome that you're here. I am really excited to continue on this bow build. We're gonna bend the limbs today. We're gonna shape them, and then we're gonna start tillering. So let's get right to it. I've seen people shape the limb in many different ways. Since it's Osage, it'll be fairly easy to shape, and I'm not gonna put a lot of reflex into it, but I do wanna put a little bit. What we're gonna do is we're gonna heat it up with a painter's gun, and I've got a little jig here that I'm gonna bend it, form it with. I see a lot of people using clamps, but I don't think there's a lot of control with clamps. It's easy to crank down the clamps too much before the wood's hot enough and crack the wood. I know that from experience. So I'm gonna show you this little jig I've got, and I'm gonna make a form for it. I have simply got a hole in the workbench. How this works is I will put a piece of wood in the hole, and then I need to shape a two-by-six here to the form that I want the bow to go, and then we'll put a counterweight on this far side. So it's an easy way to not put too much pressure because the counterweight up here along the top of the limb will just be pushing it down, and then it'll rest against the form, so there's no clamping pressure, so it only bends when it's hot enough. So let's shape this into the shape we want. In order to get an even bend, I am using a drywall square. That is just about how I want it. Okay, so I just used that drywall square in between the two nails to make a curved, perfectly curved line at the shape I want. So I just need to pull these nails out, and then we'll do that off camera, and then I will, with two hands, and then I'll put this thin end right along here, and then put the counterweight on the bow, and you'll see how it all comes together here in a second. All right, we've now got this set up. Let me show you it. It's right down here, so head down. Okay, so what we've done is the holes in the bench, got our curved piece, it just lines up right next to it. Stick it in, and then on this far end up here, we'll put a counterweight, so as we heat up this section of the limb, it'll just slowly bend over our form. When you're heating up your bow, what you need to be careful to do is heat the whole limb, because what I was starting to run into is I was just heating down here, and as I started to bend it, it almost kinked right there, so you gotta be careful to heat the whole limb so that when you bend it over your form, it will bend uniformly rather than getting a kink in it. After this part started to bend up here, I went ahead and put a clamp on it to keep it from kinking, because it is the thinnest part, and then I'm working on this middle section, and I'll continue working down up here, adding clamps as I need. Now, I'm not adding clamps to bend the wood. I'm just slightly pushing it down to bend, and then after it's already bended with the heat, I put the clamp on to hold it and hope it doesn't fall off. Let me fix that. The wood has finished cooling off, and now it's time to take it off the form. After it all finished heating up, we've got the even bend here. Here's just my clamp here for the counterweight. We can go ahead and take this off now, and you can expect this whenever you bend your bow. The bow's gonna bounce back up just a little bit, but let's check out the reflex that we do have. Look at that. Let's check out the other side. You know, it's crazy to me how easily the bow bends once it is up to temperature. It takes barely any pressure to bend the wood, so if you have to force the wood, you know it's probably not hot enough, so just keep heating it, and it'll bend just so smoothly. I get some kind of joy out of bending wood and reshaping it and bringing this live piece of material into something functional, and it's more than furniture making to me because that just is stagnant, but these limbs have to work. They have to move, and that makes it a difficult challenge, but so much fun for me, and that's why I think I like it so much because it's a challenge. Every single piece of wood is different, and it just brings a new challenge to me every day. Plus, there's thousands of different ways that you can turn a piece of wood into a bow. There's thousands of options to make it function better, to shoot faster, to shoot smoother, more accurate. You can make them for adults, for children, and then you can also make them according to historical bows and see how people used to do them and learn from the past, so we will get into some of that in the future, but for today, that is it. Thank you so much for joining me. It really has been a blast sharing my adventure in the workshop and my journey. Also, on the next video, we are going to tiller the bow. We're gonna make it shootable. We will shoot this in the next video, so it is absolutely awesome to be at this point in the process of making a bow, and remember, if you have a dream, you can accomplish it. Yeah! For the record, I can't actually pull a nail out of wood.