OSAGE | BAMBOO RECURVE BOW BUILD!

in the last video we turned a three-piece fiberglass bow that had a ton of handshock into a very accurate recurve bow nice today we're doing a throwback to this Oage core bamboo backed bow i made this one about 3 years ago and it was really popular when I made it it's a recurve bow with horn tips welcome to Bows Re-Imagined episode 5 [Music] [Music] i was so proud of this bow when I finished it originally but I see how we can improve on it today the first thing is the bamboo needs to be cleaned up i can make that look a lot better the second thing is I've learned over the past few years how to make the handles much more comfortable than I used to make them so by putting my hand in this it feels a little bit bulky just based on how I designed it so I think we'll add a fingertip overlay on the back to add a little bit more thickness and then I will reshape the handle so that it doesn't dig into specific parts of the hand this bow barely got to my draw length when shooting it so this will probably be for somebody with a 27in draw length or below the bow I built in the last video I'm giving away so if you haven't entered in the giveaway today's the last day kramer ammons archery.com you'll see it right there on the front page and then lastly the moisture content in this Osage was just about 2 to 3% higher than when I should have built the bow what that means is this shot very good but as it dried out the tiller changed so we're going to need to retweak the tillering it's not far off but we need to retweak it so that it's back to its original awesome shooting bow i could leave this bow how it is but I imagine how it could be better that's why we're here to bring new life to old bows [Music] heat heat [Music] [Applause] [Music] with most of the old finish off we're going to start by including all the material that we need so I glue everything onto the bow and then you can build out the bow from there in this case since everything's together except one piece all we need to do is put a fingertip overlay on all that is is an extra piece of material right here on the back of the bow to do that we need to flatten this bamboo so that there can be a nice clear gluing surface i'm going to use a thin piece so that it can be curved if it needs to it'll be able to flex at least we need it flat for good adhesion [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] heat heat [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] i've gotten into this habit where I guess the appropriate amount of clamps is as many as I can fit regardless if that's useful or not I just figure that more clamping pressure is better than not having enough [Music] i had an unbelievably awesome weekend but that's besides the point what matters is that we're back it's time to clean this up and to see how it bends once we determine the adjustments that need made we can make those and then it's fine-tuning and shooting and hopefully this turns out great let's find out now [Music] [Applause] [Music] i'm really close to throwing a bow string on this but I thought this would be a really cool example of Oay's orange and how the color changes over time if you're unfamiliar so check this out right here this is after I sanded off that top layer this is what I haven't sanded yet you can see the deep rich orange color on one side that happens after a finish is applied and a few years pass but freshly cut oage is much brighter and after sanding off that finish and that top layer just very little Osage it gets much brighter versus the orange dark color so if you ever make an Osage bow or buy one it'll probably come similar to this color and over time it's going to get this really cool aged dark beautiful look yeah I don't know if you see that it's just not It's just not quite right i think I probably have a negative tiller but what a cool bow yeah just some small adjustments i like to take some measurements to confirm that what my eye is seeing is is true and accurate yeah yeah so our bottom limb is bending more than our than our upper limb from the deepest part we have a 8 in negative tiller we want to adjust that to a positive 1/4 in tiller another interesting thing here you can see it unstrung bending in the direction that it is when it's strung and that stores less energy when you shoot it but sometimes it creates a smoother bow there's that tradeoff with bows that wasn't originally intentional it was because of having too much moisture in the wood on the original build and then it set in that location and that's what we call it is bow set and this bow has more set than many other bows because of the high moisture content when originally building this bow so we can take a moisture meter and measure and we're super low like 3% now generally for Oage I like to be under 8% and when I built it I'm assuming it was around 12 i don't think at the time I tested it in other words this won't set anymore really it's It's going to be pretty solid because of already shooting it and how it was built previously [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay after only like three passes the tiller is looking much better now i I'll have to measure here that's 26 in yeah 27 can get it basically definitely can get it to 28 if I want to so that's 28 such a cool looking bow the bend's looking pretty even well that's good news i think we're pretty close okay so we got like an 8 in positive tiller can draw basically i have like 29 1/2 in draw length so I don't want to hit it all the way back because of the bow being so small but I don't want to overstretch a wood bow yeah went strong we're like at 55 in so you're talking like a 58 in 59 in ammo okay i'm just going to remove a little bit more and then uh try it again take a look at this there you go 27 in it's looking super good now let's shoot it my goal is to see how this feels when it shoots i'm going to short draw it stop before my anchor point to not overdraw it but let's see how it shoots around that 26 27 inch mark some bows feel extraordinarily good right off the bat this is one of them any good tailored Osage bamboo bow feels that way i will say though if you don't have access to Osage it is not a cheap wood to get i'm doing a future project and I just purchased a stave and it was like $250 to deliver it to my doorstep just the raw material bark on it and everything this is a great shooting bow i just wish it were longer and left-handed then I could shoot it more frequently so we get to the tedious part the sanding let's do a bunch of hand sanding double check our tailor back and forth a couple times just to make sure after the hand sanding it all looks good finalize the draw weight and put the finish on it let's do that really quick and then I'll give you a final reveal of how this looks when it's completely finished up tied together and ready for someone to shoot [Music] it heat heat [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] even after redoing this bow it doesn't make the cut i'm not going to sell it from a bower's perspective here's why i don't trust it enough and that's for a couple reasons but the main one is that the bamboo is now thicker than the O so the core material is less mass than the bamboo so this is primarily a bamboo bow and I've made full bamboo bows and they don't last over time and so there's such little amount of osage on this that it's not going to be great under compression especially the more it's shot the other thing is when I glued this up a long time ago there's some really decent size glue gaps shouldn't be a problem for shooting it but it's just not the quality that I would like if I were to sell it so I'm gonna keep this one for myself or actually my wife could probably shoot this one pretty good i really like the style i really like how it turned out it just doesn't make the cut be able to give it to one of you guys but I do have that bow giveaway going on right now kramers archery.com so check the website so that you can get entered the end of today is the last day on that and I'm sure I'll do more in the future so if you want to just go to the website if you're watching this later on you can enter your email on my website and I'll let you know about those things it's a pleasure to make bows it's an honor that you watch me make bows and I'm excited for what we have coming in the future i will see you soon on the next video my name's Kramer Ammons it's been fun bye