Hardware Store Bow and Arrow Build Challenge

Today we're at America's favorite hardware store with a crisp $40 bill and we'll be leaving here with all the supplies necessary to build a bow and arrows. So we're looking for red oak with the grain running end to end and we don't want to run off on any of the sides. This one's really good on two sides. Wood grows like an onion and if you get where the growth layers come apart, it's just like cutting through the skin of an onion. If you break a layer then that's going to peel right off, which is exactly what's happening to this piece of wood. This one is a contender for sure. Let's set it aside. I'm just really shocked that we're finding stuff so easily because usually this is not very productive. This one's a contender as well. Okay that's about as good as it's going to get. I'm going to cut this at seven feet. We found dowels. The more flexible your arrow, the weaker your bow needs to be to match. And you can always weaken the spine of an arrow by adding a heavier point to the end. So I'd rather have it too heavy than too light because also if it's way too light it could explode while I'm shooting it and go through my hand. There are two dollars and 58 cents per. 2.58 times three plus 2.18 per foot and I want seven feet times seven. So we're at $23 already and we don't have a string or arrow points or fletchings. Four dollars and 58 cents. For little screws that'll add weight to the end this is fine. Now we need a string and the most important part of a string is that it doesn't stretch. I'm just looking for a thin string. Paracord is the obvious choice but it stretches too much so I don't want to use that. I'm hoping I can even get something thinner that I could braid together like this. Braided mason twine. We're gonna try braided mason line and see if that works and I'll twist it together to make a thicker string and we should be good. Okay we need wood to make the bows, arrow shafts, string, got it, glue, arrow points, we ended up using blunts, and feathers. Home Depot doesn't sell feathers but I have an idea. This is what it's like when you go to Ikea and you get a shelf. So I've got all my supplies here. I got my oak for making the bow, my dowels, feathers, glue, screws for the tips, and I'm not sure if this string material will work but we'll do our best. I've also got just a few hand tools, a block plane, two different kinds of rasps, and a saw. I think I should be able to build the entire bow with just these tools. It's also necessary to have a way to hold the wood still while you're working on it. I'm just going to measure out six feet and then cut the extra section off and glue that right into the middle and that'll be my handle. I'm over building this bow a little bit more than I would on my typical bow builds because I didn't get to chase a growth ring on the back of this piece of wood. It should be okay because I have a really nice straight grain piece of oak but just because I'm not sure, I'm going with a six foot long bow instead of my regular 62 inch bow. So it's an extra 10 inches of working limb. If this doesn't work something went horribly wrong. Another thing that I'm noticing as I look at this piece of wood is that the grain isn't perfectly straight end to end. So instead of putting my tips in the center where they would usually go, I'm actually going to offset them so that I can follow the growth rings as good as possible. Another thing that's kind of interesting I just noticed is that this is sapwood and this is heartwood. I'm just going to put this piece that I cut off right on the handle section but before I glue this on I want to use this rasp to put tapers in it because obviously that's not how the handle is going to look. The bow will get thicker as it gets narrower so that it doesn't lose strength. So before I even glue it on I'm going to take this rasp and just make those tapers right now. When I bought super glue I wasn't thinking about gluing this onto the wood. I was thinking about the fletchings, the feathers that I'm gluing to the arrow and typically I'd use wood glue for this but I don't see why this wouldn't work. I still have seven dollars left so if it does pop off I could go back and I could get wood glue. I do think it'll look better because it's clear glue. Sometimes if you have little gaps the wood glue shows through but sure did use a lot of super glue on that one piece. Hopefully I have enough left for my feathers. The glue is dry and it looks like I did a pretty good job. I don't see any gaps in there so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to taper the handle so that it's more comfortable in my hand. I'm just going to get a rough shape on the handle because no sense in making a finished handle if we don't even know if the bow is going to work yet. And then I'll taper the limbs so that we can start floor tillering. I've made one red oak bow before from a tree and usually when I start working with oak I try and use it like I use my hickory and birch which is what I make most of bows out of. I'm always super frustrated at how poorly it cuts with a draw knife or a plane but then as soon as I touch it with a rasp I remember that this is the best rasping wood ever. If somebody was wanting to get into bow making and they wanted to do it as cheaply as possible I would go and look through all the boards at Home Depot and Lowe's or whatever hardware store is close to you. That would get yourself a farrier's rasp and I think that you could build the entire bow with just a farrier's rasp and maybe some sandpaper to smooth out your rasp marks when you're done. Now my handle needs to be tapered down here to the actual limb thickness but before I can do that I need to decide how thick I'm going to make these limbs. I don't want to go too thin before I start tillering because I might end up with some weak spots and end up with a much weaker bow than I want. I think a safe bet would be half an inch and I'll show you how to do that with minimal tools. So if I just take this here we're going to measure from the back of the bow the side that faces away from me half an inch and I'll do that a couple of times down the limb just to make sure. Now if I take my fingernail and place it against the back of the bow and hold my pencil right here so that it's touching that mark I should be able to slide my fingernail up and down the bow and it'll keep that measurement. You could also use a compass but it's not necessary. Now as I'm tapering my handle to make that a nice smooth transition I need to make sure that I don't go below that line. Now I want to bring my bow down to that line but that's not as simple as you think. You can't just take the rasp flat and file it down to that line because you would damage the side that you're pulling towards by ripping out all of these fibers on the far side. So what you actually do is I take my rasp and I work at an angle this way and bring this side of the bow down to that line. Then I do the same thing on this side and end up with a ridge down the center. Then I very carefully take the ridge off making sure that I never touch the file to the far side of the limb because if you did that you would end up with tear out. Now that the limbs are tapered to thickness they're bending a little bit which means that I can start tillering but because this is a different bow than I usually make, usually I make my bows from trees, I found two failure points. The first one being that even though these growth lines go from end to end by tapering the limb I'm manufacturing runoff of growth rings because this growth ring here ends right there and this one ends here and the same happens on the other side. I'm not sure if as I'm tillering it these are going to want to lift off of the bow. And then the other thing, and this might kind of be an advantage, typically when you cut from a tree the growth rings are the same way as the back of the bow and so you don't want to break a growth layer because then that's where you're ending fibers. But since these fibers are going up and down like sheets I have these two defects on the back of the bow from clamping it on my little table. I didn't realize that there was nails sticking up on my table so I dented the back of the bow. But since the fibers are like sheets this way can I technically tiller the bow from the back? I don't see why not so I'm gonna go ahead and try and sand these out hopefully it doesn't break. Now we just need to put some simple grooves in the ends so that we can attach a string. Nothing fancy about it just something to hold the strings on. Now my bow has string grooves it's ready to be tillered and honestly this is the part of the process I was the most nervous about the string. The important part about a bow string is that it doesn't stretch. So many people on the internet tell you how to make a survival bow with paracord but I've tried that and I've done it many times and the reason that I think it sucks is because with a string that stretches you have to put so much more bend into the bow just to get the string on and then as soon as you get it on the string stretches and then it's almost like your bow is not strong or you've got a super low brace height which is the distance between the handle and the string. And so I wanted to try something different which is this twisted mason line but because it was all wrapped in plastic I couldn't feel it or test it before I bought it and now that it's open I'm questioning it even more. You make a loop and then you go through just like an overhand knot and you do just a few extra wraps right here. This will be really telling if this stretches a whole bunch and the bow doesn't really bend then we've got problems. First bend. Overall I don't see any horribly weak spots. Maybe I would protect this right here where I sanded off that those two little holes that I made and I also think that this limb is bending more than that so I probably am going to remove more on this side. Now it's just a process of checking the bend making marks with my pencil and all the stiff spots then removing wood and doing that over and over and over again until you've got this bow I'm actually pretty stoked with how this bow turned out so far. The tiller looks really good and because it's so long it's six feet tall I don't see any signs of pieces raising on the back and our string stretches a little bit but it's not too bad so I'm okay with that. It's not a bad tiller. I think it's actually I think I actually did a pretty good job because I was so hesitant with the string and the fibers raising on the back I actually ended up with a pretty light bow. It's pulling about 30 pounds at 29 inches but I like how smooth the draw is with a nice long bow like this you hardly get any stack but it might be a little bit slow we'll find out after we make arrows. Now I've got my dowels for arrows. The first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna cut them to 29 and a half inches. That string groove is the perfect size let's see how it shoots. My goal with this bow build was to lower the barrier to entry for anybody that wants to get into bow making and I think that I've proven if you want to go to the hardware store with 30 40 bucks and make a bow and arrow that shoots you can definitely do that but bow making is an art to me and now I'm going to take this very oversimplified bow and make it into something that I'm proud of and I'm going to use some materials that you can't necessarily get at the hardware store. Most of them I found in the woods. I'm also going to make a B55 bow string. You can get B55 string material on Amazon for like 10 bucks but it'll dramatically increase the performance of this bow and at the end of this video I'll put a link down in the description where you can enter to win this bow. Not the crappy hardware store version but the finished product. By placing my tip overlay here I'm choosing to cut off about an inch of the end of the bow and that'll actually increase the draw little tine coming off the side and I used that as my arrow rest. This is probably my favorite arrow rest of any bow that I've ever made. I used a tiny bit of that twisted mason twine for the little knot that tells me where to knock my arrow. I knock just below that. These are links for silencers to keep the string from vibrating. I did a two-tone wood stain finish and coated it with polyurethane so it'd be a little bit water resistant. I actually carried this bow around hunting for the early part of moo season and I really love the way it shoots. This is the first bow I've ever made that's actually center shot or that the arrow point is a perfect point of aim and I'm not sure what about it made it so that when I draw back and look down my arrow the arrow point is a perfect sight at about 15 yards but it makes it so much easier to shoot because then I only have to judge distance. I don't also have to compensate for archer's paradox which is something I have to do on almost all of my other bows. So with the original stretchy string and with it being two inches longer it was pulling about 29 pounds at 28 inches and now we're at 35. So it's a perfect small game hunting bow or a target bow. When I was younger and I think a lot of other people that are getting into archery they think that they need a nice big powerful bow because that's what you would use for hunting but I would actually argue that it's better to practice with light bows like this in the 25 to 35 pound range because you never get sore and you can shoot an infinite amount of arrows and it's still fun. It also helps prevent bad habits because if you shoot a bow that's too heavy for you, you learn to short draw which is when you don't draw it all the way back. So I'll be giving this bow away. There will be a link in the description to a google form where you put your email address to enter to win this bow.