Build Your First Hickory Self Bow

if you want to make an amazing Hickory bow that's very accurate with minimal tools and time this video is for you we're going to cut the string grooves in first then I'm going to show you how to build a tillering tree and then finally how to tiller the bow and finish it I will also do a speed test put a leather handle on the bow and do an accuracy test my name's Kramer amons thank you so much for joining me today let's have some fun although I have a lot of tools in the shop you'll see in the background I'm going to use three to five hand tools to build this entire bow now you may not know this about Hickory but if you look at wood density charts Hickory Falls right close to oage and it actually acts really similar to oage in a finished bow when you shoot it working with the wood's a little bit different but this is one of my very favorite bow woods and it's super accessible as a matter of fact we actually sell these now at shadowproof archery different Hickory staves if you're interested and building your own hickory bow this specific Stave is a 68 in Hickory Stave it's already pre pre tapered and pre floor tillered if you have a hickory board that's not pre- tapered the tapered is pretty simple 1 and 1/2 in at the handle and taper that to the tip that's a 3/4 of an inch that's it basically you can just do a continuous taper all the way down and you'll get a great shooting bow the belly of the bow is the side that faces the Archer when you shoot and the back of the bow faces the target I'll refer to these two sides with this terminology for the string grooves I like to measure down half inch on the back of the bow and 1 and 1/4 in on the belly of the bow connect those two marks and that's the angle to cut in your string Groove I'm going to use a little rat tail file or a little chainsaw file to go ahead and just follow that line the goal is to cut the string Groves deep enough that the bow string lays flush in the string Groove when you put a bow string in it the bow string doesn't stick out any and that tends to be a pretty good depth flip the bow to the other side and repeat on the other side just make sure the angle is going in the same same direction from the back of the bow to the belly once the depth is cut in I like to get this type of sandpaper here this specific sandpaper rips in really nice thin strips which helps you sand in these odd location links to all these products in the description the last thing to do is to take out this little area right here the reason is when your String's on the bow and you draw it back it'll catch right there so we want to smooth this out you can even use a little knife like this and just carve it out and it's really quick it does not need to take long at all and it doesn't have to be super precise this is my favorite way to Bow make it's kind of an art to me then I can sand that a little bit and do that on the other side but you'll see when you draw the bow back now it has a smooth place to go this time I'll use a chisel and for the last little step I'll use the Sandpaper to clean up the top side here and kind of make sure everything's matching up nice and good rep repete on the second side and now we can put a string on it but before we tiller the bow and shoot the bow let's build a quick tillering tree find a board that's around 3 ft long it's time to measure but measure from the top of the bow not the board the first measurement can be somewhere around 10 in and from that 10 in Mark now I can mark down every single inch until I hit my draw length so I'm going to go about 29 in and just to clarify it's going to be 29 in from the back of the bow there I will just do marks every inch between you could cut notches into the stick but instead today I'm going to use screws the one super super important thing to pay attention to is to make sure the screw shaft is smooth if there's threads going all the way up the shaft those threads will wear out and potentially cut through your tillering string what we're building I call a tillering stick whereas a tillering tree uses a pulley system to pull the string down this is the exact tillering stick I would make if I'm planning on on making less than five bows maybe but if I plan on making a lot of bows in the future or you like just to build really cool jigs you could build a really cool tillering stick or a really cool tillering tree but if your goal is to get a finished bow as quick as possible this is probably the way to go perfect I've got all the screws in now I know when I draw the bow down on this tillering stick all I have to do is get to the bottom screw once the Bow's at the bottom screw I can shoot it now the first option is just to stick this in a vise crank it down and you can use it there but there's another way to use it if you're building your bow in your Vise and you don't want to move it in and out all the time or if you don't have a vise this is what I would do grab a scrap board take your tillering stick and screw this into the base now you can mount this to any tabletop or anywhere that you would like so the last thing we need to do is to find a way to keep this from sliding back and forth you could Notch in in but if you do notch in know that your screws will be off or your marks will be off the other thing you can do is add more wood up here to make it more stable by just screwing it in or you could add screws just to hold it in place so in order to stick with a theme of keeping it quick and simple I'm going to use some screws awesome and there we have it next you'll want to find a tillering string this is another thing we sell at shatterproof archery you can make your own or use some other cordage if you would like the nice thing about a really good tillering string is you have an actual bow string loop on this side where this side fades out and it's an extra long string so you can tie a knot on this side and start tillering the bow then as the bow starts to bend more and more you can shorten the length of the string and actually with a good tillering string you can shoot the bow with the tillering string on it and then you know exactly what length of bow string you need to buy or make for your bow that you just built good tillering string helps a lot but not completely necessary so side one of the tillering string will go on the first string Groove for the second Loop I'll tie a quick release knot so that we can adjust it later on the string is completely loose now but it is on the string grooves so now you can start putting a little bit of pressure on this Bow by starting to bend it as you can see our Bow's bending gently now we start to tiller tillering is the process of getting the bow to bend the way you want it to bend so that it can shoot properly with a flat Hickory bow like this we want a nice even bend on both limbs Some people prefer to just eyeball the limbs which is a fun way to build a bow but if you want to double check and make sure you could use a straight edge like this and rub it on the belly of the bow what you're doing is paying attention to the Gap in the center of your straight edge wherever the Gap is larger that means the Bow's bending more there wherever there is no gap or it's hardly a gap at all that means it's bending Less in those areas you want to take Material off where it's bending less there is a tool that does this for you and is 100% accurate that's called a tillering gizmo these are at shatterproof archery or you can check out a video where I teach you how to make these as well what a gizmo has done is combined the straight edge with the pencil coming through so it automatically marks where you need to remove wood now that my locations are marked where I need to remove wood we'll take it off the tillering tree and we'll go remove wood in those areas is now some of you may be thinking Kramer what about a bow backing don't we need a backing on the back of this bow so that it can hold up well no you don't need a backing on a hickory bow cuz the material is literally that strong unless you want to make something maybe above 50 lb will a backing make it faster yes will allow you to do different designs yes do I like to use a backing yes but you don't need one the grain can be running off the edge it doesn't matter Hickory is strong enough that you do not need a backing in this scenario hey a brief note from future Kramer real quick I've never built a bow above 50 lbs with a hickory no backed bow the material feels very strong you probably could that's just where it starts to make me feel uncomfortable Hickory recurves and bow backings with bamboo and things like that are coming in future videos so stay tuned for those you can see my pencil marks right here this cabinet scraper will allow me to remove really nice little shavings the big question is how much should you remove well remove more than the pencil line but not a ton you can't add more material unless you add a backing later on to make it stronger so if you remove less then you have a better chance of having the bow you want with that in mind you can remove more wood early in tillering and then reduce the amount later in tillering this is how I do it I eyeball it but if you're not going to eyeball it this is what you can do grab a Sharpie one of these king size Sharpies is nice and you're literally going to paint in the area that you want to remove wood the Sharpie will literally soak into the wood and what you're going to do is remove the Sharpie marks and you'll see as you remove wood the Sharpie is going to come with it and this will help you know you're removing it evenly in this whole area this allows you to have control and patience when bow making which is really important come back over to the tillering tree and start bending the bow down now one of the tips is to never pull it with more poundage down on the tillering tree than your finished draw length you can use a little scale to test this or just do it by feel but for me I'm going to try to make something in between 40 and 50 pounds so I will not draw this down more than 50 lbs while it's on the tillering tree the next thing is a tactic called exercising the bow limbs exercising the bow limbs is the process of repeatedly bending the limbs until it gets used to the new amount of material that is on the limbs what has memory to it so if you remove material in one area of the wood it kind of remembers how it felt before that material was removed and by exercising the limbs up and down 20 to 30 times it's going to establish this new memory the way I do this is just by pulling it on the tillering tree until we get a string strung on it at brace height and then I'll exercise it by hand by pulling the string back at this stage in the process I'm going to just pull it down a little bit like this and then maybe hook it on a screw for 10 or 15 seconds to let it sit there and kind of get the new shape of how much material you removed grab it again pull it move it one more Notch down and I'll just move back and forth between removing wood and checking the tiller I also like to trap the edges meaning I'll just take sandpaper and sand over the edges so that a splinter doesn't lift and I'll do that on the belly and on the back of the bow like this this is what you can expect to see after using the Gizmo you'll notice that the pencil in random different areas and so I'll generally block off these areas and make them really clear for myself with pencil or if I'm going to use a Sharpie do that as well all right one more quick thing when working down you want to make sure that this depth and this depth stay even so every once in a while just check with a tape measure that you're not wearing down one side way more than the other you want them to stay even that'll help prevent limb twist well we're moving a lot faster than I thought we would I thought I have to go back and forth a few times if you place a string on the bow while it's bending you can see how big your brace height would be and once you get to around 6 in I generally put a string on it and we're getting very close there and since I have the second string sitting here I'll mark it and now I know exactly the length I need for the string the reason you want to put a string on the bow as soon as you can is because it changes how the bow bends especially near the tips this last section will we pulled in more and bend a little bit more when there's an actual string on it because the force is coming towards itself more rather than just down okay this String's a little too long even getting a string on it just like that is going to start helping you see the bend properly we're still quite stiff but we're at about a 14in draw length which feels to me to be about 40 lb we've got a bow string all the way to brace height once you have the bow string on the bow I like to get a specific measurement that helps you know whether one limb is bending more than the other to see how closely they're bending to each other place a tape measure against the belly of the bow and find the deepest part of the limb on this limb it's 7 in I'll come over to this side and realize my deepest part to 6 and 3/4 of an inch what that tells me is this limb is bending less than the other one so I may want to focus on that a little bit but something I do shoot for is a/ qu in positive tiller for most my bows and what that means is that you want the top limb to bend a quar inch more than the bottom limb so technically I've already got a quinch positive tiller right now so for the way I'm tillering I really don't need to adjust it all I need to do since we're looking really good is reduce the poundage a little bit so I can get it all the way back to full draw 24 25 26 28 29 hey we got it to 29 now we just got to make sure the tiller's good feels decently heavy 45ish probably at 29 let's run the Gizmo and get some feedback real [Applause] quick yeah exactly what I thought it's not bad okay maybe one the bottom limb to bend a little more than it is right now top limb's done the more material you take off the less material it takes to make a difference so the further in the process you go the more you want to slow down and do less material and check more frequently this Hickory really soaked up the Sharpie I can still see some faint faint Sharpie lines in here so keep that in mind you may want to stop early enough that you can get those completely out most other woods I've used that Sharpie method with I didn't have that issue okay I'm going to pause right there on the limbs I'm going to shape the handle I'm going to do a universal handle so that you can shoot it left or right-handed and you can shoot it directly off your hand as the arrow rest I'm coming an inch and a half in on the fade outs and that's where I'll start to cut this material out it'll look something like this and it'll take off all of this material my tool of choice for shaping the handle is going to be a rasp all right let's check the poundage up here on the tillering tree real quick see where we're at 26 in is 38 43.8 so I believe I'm done maybe I'll do a little bit more tillering let's see how we're looking not too bad I think I'm going to go ahead and shoot it all right it's time for the best part let's make sure we're nice and loose here as my ritual I do like 3/4 draw to start just to feel out the bow before I go all in ooh has a little zip on it just too much fun can't believe it's legal it's really quiet too this handle is thin enough that you can feel the bow bending through the handle that's okay this would be a bending handle bow if you wanted the handle to not Bend but you only had this thickness all you have to do is glue another piece of wood on before you start tillering and then that's going to make it more rigid in the handle so it'll be non-bending if you do glue a piece of wood on then you can cut an arrow shelves and really have a lot of flexibility there I wanted to make this one simple that's why I kept it bending through the handle and just rounded it over and it feels super nice in the hand now that I know the Bow's functional and shooting great it's time to make it a little bit prettier so we're going to shape the tip overlays and sand the bow down write some information on the bow and give it a nice little finish I used a spray polyurethane but you can use whatever you would like for the finish and then I wanted to add add a leather handle so I just nicely punched some holes in this little piece of leather and sewed it on I like to do the threads of sewing on the back of the bow so you don't feel it when you're holding the bow for this style of handle the leather makes it more comfortable to hold in the hand it also acts as a strike plate for your arrow so it's silent when you shoot now the Bow's finished but it's time to set it up for shooting so adding knocking points from shadowproof archery of course and I'm also Al going to make sure I get some arrows that shoot pretty good with this bow and see how well and proficient and accurate I can get with this bow in one day this is a speed test with a 250 grain Arrow so a pretty light Arrow but decent results 159 yeah that's probably it about 158 159 I'm now going to shoot three groups from 15 yards and we'll see how I can do so far I've been shooting pretty good with this bow I'm not very good at archery but let's see how good we can do we did all right in the middle but let's do the three outter dots see if we can hit those a different Target for each shot going to go top left first let's go top top right and now let's hit the bottom right at least we made it inside the circles just on the edges all right let's do three in the middle to finish it out well I'm pretty pleased with that I'm very very pleased with this bow it's super cool I'm excited to keep this one up on the bow wall and use it frequently thank you so much for watching if you've made it this far it is such an honor I still can't believe anybody who even watches my videos it just blows my mind that I get to make videos and I get to build bows so I really really really appreciate it I hope this was able to add a little value to you and hopefully my experience with bow making isn't in vain and that I can help some other people so I really appreciate it I'll see you guys on the next video Stay shatterproof