How to Shape a Hupa Bow, Primitive Bowmaking

Welcome to the Primitive Lifeways channel. In this video I'll take you step by step in how to measure and lay out one of the most complex bows in North America to reproduce known as the Hoopa bow. So stick with me I got a great show coming up. So here's a Hoopa style bow that I'm working on. This will be mostly sapwood. You can see there's heartwood on the belly side and I have this laid out. So this is going to be once again the back of the bow. I have a couple knots here. The sinew will lay over those. That should be no big deal as I final tiller this project. So I have this laid out. This is what I'm working with but I will show you how to lay out this same design on the belly side. I will be removing most of this belly wood as the tillering process begins but nonetheless you'll get a good idea on a clean piece of lumber how to lay out one of the most complex bows in North America. So we'll get started. So as we start I use a couple different rulers. I like to use a yardstick and then a smaller ruler. This bow is or this stave is 38 inches total length. So the first thing I need to do is I need to divide this in half. So half of 38 is 19. So as we go from one tip I find 19. I make a mark and draw it across. That's my center mark. This is the handle area. So I start from the handle area. I like a four inch handle. So I find two inch. The two inch mark. I draw a line once again all the way across. Same thing on this other side from two inches. Draw a mark. That is my handle section. Okay so from here I sight down the log and I find my center point. Right where this gouges in here is the center point. I create a mark. If you're working with a wide stave like this is, this stave is over it's three and a half inches wide. So if you're dealing with a wide stave you don't really have to get things perfect. But you want to make sure that you have a good center line. And then I trace this all the way up from tip to tip. I'll do that right now. Now I have a center line drawn right down the middle of the stave. Now with these sinew back bows you don't really have to worry about the grain to an extent. We violate rings. We violate the grain. Like I said to an extent. So you can see that the grain kind of turns at this tip. I'm going right through the center. That shouldn't be a big deal. That's where I'm going to slightly flip the tip. Cut in my knock. I'll be fine right there. So what I do is I want to measure out my my knocks and the tip. So what I do is I like a nice narrow tip. The narrower the tip the faster the bow is. A quarter inch. So I go a quarter inch on each side. And that gives me where my knock will sit. And we have a half inch total. Same thing with this other side. I go a quarter inch and a quarter inch. So once more we have a half inch total. So these are the knocks or the tip of my bow. So now we know that we have 19 inches in the center. I need to find the center of each limb. So 19 divided by two is nine and a half. So I find nine and a half. And once again on this side I find nine and a half. Draw my line across. Same thing with this side. So now I have the center of my bow. I have the center the mid limb on each side. And I have my knocks. I also have a line drawn right down the center of this stave. So the hoop of bows are widest at the center limb. And that's what we want to do following proper direction and replicating the pass. Okay so once again depending on the length of the stave if you have a longer piece of lumber of course this center area needs to be longer. This is 38 inches so I'll have 36 from tip to tip. I go four inches total in the center section. So just like the handle I have four inches. We'll do the same thing to the opposite limb. So two inches and two inches. Draw that across. Handle. Mid limbs. So moving forward I'll work on the handle section and then I can connect everything together and we have a good rough shape of the hoop of bow. And of course I refine things as I continue to tiller in the final tillering stage. So typically with a hoop of style bow I like the handle the center of the handle to be about an inch and a quarter wide. Anything narrower this center section tends to bend more as the limbs remain stiff. I want a nice elliptical tiller that adds longevity to this bow and it takes the stress off of this handle section. I first start off with an oversized handle and once again as I refine as I go into final tillering I will end up with an inch and a quarter total width. Right now we'll go with an inch and a half. So here we have an inch and a half and at this point I just connect all of these lines together. So I start from the outer mark that I just laid in and I connect this to the mid limb lower mark. Same thing with this side. I start from this outer mark and connect it to the lower line. We'll do the same thing here. A little bit of waviness on this side. No big deal. It's where the draw knife cut into. Okay so you can see we have these lines connected together. You can see that this handle tapers in and then we start slowly tapering out to this mid limb. So from here I just trace the line right along the edge and same thing with this side. So now for the tips I just trace the tip into this upper line of the mid limb. Repeating the process and same thing here. So I just trace this together once more on the tip to this upper line. And that is how to measure and lay out a hoopa style bow. Of course this belly side will end up getting removed. The back side is what I'm actually going to be using as a layout and design for this particular project. Assuming it survives the tillering process I'll get back on camera and show you how well it performs. These are high performance bows as mentioned before. Extremely complex but very very fast. A short bow like this will go right through a deer. This is 36 inches from knock to knock. It will be a screaming fast bow. So anyway folks I do hope you enjoyed this video series. If you did help us out give it a thumbs up. Click the notification bell. Subscribe to the Primitive Lifeways channel on YouTube and share this video throughout social media. It really helps us to grow expand and continue producing high quality content. We'll see you in the next one. Thanks for watching.