Backing a bow with Rawhide (how to)

What we're going to do today is just go ahead and back this bow with rawhide. Now I've got here two rawhide strips that are long enough to cover the back of this bow. We're going to overlap them right here in the handle and our handle cover, our leather will cover that up so it looks good. First thing you want to do is rehydrate your rawhide. So I've got a cup of warm water. You don't want it real hot, just kind of warm. And just stick that in there and let it rehydrate. It'll take, I don't know, an hour or so. In the meantime, I'm going to prep the back of this bow. The first thing I want to do is scarify this thing a little bit. And one of the best things that I've found to do that is an old hacksaw blade. So what I'm going to do is hold this thing and just make some long scrapes over the whole thing. I'm putting little longitudinal scars in the back of this bow just to increase the surface area and give that glue a good place to hold on to. So I'm going to do that over the entire bow and get it roughed up good while that rawhide is rehydrating. All right, now that we've got the back of this good and scarred up, we're going to go ahead and take it out of the vise and then wash the back of it. And you can just wash it with a mixture of just dish soap and water just to get any kind of oil residues off the back just to make sure that glue is going to hold good. All right, so I've got the back of this washed off completely. Got the oil off of there. And our rawhide looks like it's doing pretty good. It's rehydrated. So we'll pull it out of there. Shake off the excess water. Now we've got one of the good things about rawhide is you can stretch it whichever way you need to to make it cover what you need to. You can make your own rawhide. It's easy to make or you can pick it up off my website. One of the things I like to do with the rawhide, you need to pull it back so it overlaps the handle here. And then I'll take and stretch it long ways. And what that does is it pulls all that grain in line with the bow. When you draw this bow, it's going to be wanting to stretch this rawhide. And if you've already got a lot of that stretch out of it, it helps hold everything together. Now, if you stretched it too far, like back here, it got pretty thin. You can pull that back out so that everything sits on the bow and covers everything. Now, you'll notice when you stretch this stuff, it'll curl. You can put that curl so that it wraps around the bow instead of putting it the other way so it curls up off of it. It helps to hold it down while it's drying. So just pull all that out. All right, so we've got it covered on the back of this limb here pretty good. So we're just going to take this, set it right back here for the time being. We're going to put us some glue on here. Now, this is just regular carpenter's glue, regular wood glue. You can also use Titebond 2 or Titebond 3, which is a waterproof glue. I don't think it matters a whole lot because this is going to be sealed. But if you want a little extra insurance, that Titebond will give it to you. You don't want too much glue on here because it's just going to seep out the sides and cause a big mess. But you don't want to skimp on it either. Get you a nice little layer. Get it all evenly distributed. Now, we'll lay this rawhide right back on there. Now, you want to be real conscious of getting this to lay down real flat on the back of the bow. Make sure there's no air pockets down in there. And you can just take your thumbs and work from the inside and work out and work those air pockets out of there. And just work it. If you've got some excess rawhide, you can pull it down towards the end. Take some of that stretch out of it. Now that we've got that laid on the back, we're just going to go ahead and trim this end off. Save that for laces or whatever you want to make out of it. And then we're going to carefully kind of trim the end of this just a little bit and leave you some room on the sides. Leave about an eighth or a quarter inch or so on each side of your limb. The only reason I'm trimming this is because we're going to wrap this with an ace bandage or an old t-shirt to keep this rawhide down flat on the back of this bow while it's drying. And if we leave this big overhanging stuff, a lot of times it won't lay down flat on the back of the bow. It'll cause air pockets. Got that in there. I've just got some old t-shirt that I've cut up. We're just going to kind of mummify this thing. Wrap it over itself once like that. Ace bandage works really good for this, but an old t-shirt is a whole lot cheaper and it works too. Just be careful when you come back and wrap it over this side. Make sure that that is laying down over the sides of the bow. Once this dries, we'll come back and trim all this excess stuff off. Make everything look good. Wrap it all the way out to the limb tips. All right, so now that we've got it all wrapped up, we'll just pull it out of here. Let it dry for a few days and we'll come back to it. So I've had this bow curing behind the wood stove here for about 24 hours. Everything, I can feel the rawhide through there. It feels like it's solid and set up good. So we'll go ahead and take the wrapping off and just see what we've got under there. It's looking pretty good. So we'll just go ahead and trim these edges off now so that the rawhide fits right on the back of the bow and doesn't fold over. I can file down the sides here and that'll fit this perfectly to the back. Once we get the rawhide all trimmed and shaped to the back of the bow, we'll just start sanding these sides off. So once you get done sanding, you've got a perfectly fitted piece of rawhide to the back of your bow. You can just, you can stain this with wood stain if you want to. You can seal it up with whatever sealer you use. And that's pretty much it.