How to Shape a Comanche Bow, Primitive Bowmaking

Welcome to the Primitive Lifeways channel on YouTube. I'm so glad you can join me here today. In this video I'll demonstrate and discuss how to lay out and measure a plain style bow or a double curve design. So stick around I'll be right back with you. So the first thing that I do is I need to find the center of the stave. I take the length and I divide it by two. So we have about 52 inches divided by two. That puts me at 26 inches. I mark that and I draw a line. From there I measure two inches on each side and that gives me a four inch handle area. So at each two inch mark I will once again mark a line across the stave. From there I want to create a center line running vertically along this entire stave. So I find a center spot and I just trace all the way up to the tip following the grain. Luckily this grain is nice and straight but with a character bow or a snaky bow you want to make sure you follow that. So then we have our handle and we have a center line. Now from the handle I'm just making horizontal marks on both sides of the stave every two inches. So you can see here we have two inches all the way up until we get about six inches and that's where I taper into my tips. So once we have those horizontal marks made it's very simple at the horizontal marks I just measure out an inch and a quarter and I make vertical marks right at that measurement every two inches. You can see we have the horizontal marks and then we have the vertical inch and a quarter marks all the way up. From there it's as easy as tracing the lines together using the edge of the ruler. So I'll flip the stave over and you can see that's exactly what I've done on this side. The vertical marks are hard to see because once again I took the pencil and penciled everything in but we have those horizontal marks once every two inches on both sides an inch and a quarter wide and I just connected the lines. Now I'm just connecting these lines together and this creates a very precise measurement. So I don't have a narrow spot in this stave and I don't have a wide spot because again my two inch increments are very close together. I don't want to go in eight inch increments or 12 inch increments because then my lines tend to wander off and I have a narrow spot. Two inches is a very nice number and it keeps the stave or the bow in this case nice and even. So again we just trace that in from line to line and I've reached my end. Now when I'm talking about an inch and a quarter total width I'm measuring off of this center line. So I have an inch and a quarter on this center line total width. Another thing to keep in consideration is depending on the stave of course this is a really nice clean stave. If you're working with a piece of lumber like this with nice straight grain I try to keep things as even as possible. So that means I'm taking off equal amounts of wood on the right side my right side and equal amounts on my left side. So on this right side I'm taking off an eighth of an inch and on the left side I'm also removing an eighth of an inch. And once I remove that I have my inch and a quarter total. And again you can see here we're removing an eighth of an inch an eighth of an inch all the way down. So this is going to make a really nice bow. Now staying traditional I went ahead and shortened this stave up a little bit. At this point moving forward I will take my draw knife and a rasp and just follow these lines. A very easy process but once again we have to work slow so we don't gouge the wood. Osage likes to travel. Okay so as you folks can see very easy and simplistic measurements. At this point I'm ready to set back the handle continue tillering both of the limbs to get that nice swooping double curved shape in this bow. If you folks are interested in making and reproducing a plain style bow in an upcoming video series I show exactly how to do so. It's a step-by-step tutorial. I think you folks will enjoy it so stay tuned for that. If you enjoyed this video help me out subscribe to the Primitive Lifeways channel on YouTube. Click the notification bell hit the thumbs up button and share this video on social media. It really helps us to grow expand and most important hit a wide diverse audience. Take care once again I'm Jeff with PrimitiveLifeways.com we'll see in the next one.