How to Build a Board Bow for $7

My name is Ben and I've been building bows for about 15 years. And today I'm going to show you how you can make a high performance recurve bow that you can take hunting for less than $10. So I actually have to open mail for myself. I live in Alaska in a really small town and we actually don't even have a hardware store here. But my family lives in Illinois. So when I go to visit them I always go to all the hardware stores and pick through the lumber section. Every time I come to Illinois I always like to go to Menards. And of this entire rack of wood, these are all hardwoods, there are only two pieces in this entire store that are suitable to make a longbow. Let me show you why they're good. These lines are the growth rings and what I'm looking for is to be able to follow a growth ring from one end all the way down to the other end. But you can see most of these other pieces either have flaming where they cut across growth rings or the lines go off to the edge. You can't use either of these boards to make a bow. But this one is absolutely perfect. It's the only one in the entire store. And then there's also this little one behind it which is the same way. So this one was $6.99 and this one was $12. This one's twice as thick. And the reason that I pick these boards is because of the species of wood, which is hickory, and the perfection in the grain. I can't stress enough how important it is that you pick the right piece of wood. If you do everything right except for this step, your bow will break. And no you can't just put fiberglass tape on the back of your bow and make up for it being a crappy piece of wood. I hate that that advice is on the internet, I think it's horrible advice. Don't put fiberglass tape on the back of your bow. Don't back your bow with anything, just pick a good piece of wood. Now like I said, this piece is hickory. But I would also like rock maple, which is hard maple, sugar maple, those are all names for the same species of wood. White ash is fantastic, I would almost put that up right next to hickory. Red oak makes a great bow, but it's not nearly as much fun to work with. But today we're using hickory. So I'm going to actually unwrap this plastic wrap, and I'm going to draw out my bow design. Let's talk about bow design. The longer you make your bow, the less each portion of the limb has to bend, and so the safer it is to actually draw back to your drawing. This is why most advice for really beginner bowyers is to make the bow exceptionally long. Like I've even seen people say to make your first bow over 6 feet long. I don't think it needs to be that long. If you're a good bowyer and you're confident in your tillering capability, you can make a bow that comes all the way back to 28 inch draw length and have it only be like 58 inches long. And that sounds really appealing because you want it to be compact, especially if you're going to use it in the woods. But there's two main downsides to a bow being really short. The first one is, it's more likely to break because you're stressing the wood much harder than if it was longer. And the second one is that if you have a really short, straight-limbed bow, when you draw your bow back, the string angle nears 90 degrees. And the closer it gets from where the wood, like the actual limb, and the string becomes 90 degrees, the more stack you get, which is where at the end of your draw length, every millimeter you come back adds like 10 pounds. And so then you're working really hard, but it's not actually transferring all that energy into the arrow. So you're essentially making a less smooth draw cycle and working your body really hard to get less energy return out of the arrow. So a longer bow has a smoother draw cycle and can transfer more of the energy to the arrow. But a longer bow has bigger limbs and more mass that it also has to fling forward, which is transferring more of the energy into the actual mass of the limbs and not the arrow. All that to say that there's definitely a happy medium for bow length. And from all of the experimentation I've found, if I'm doing a straight-limbed bow, like this one, where there's no recurves or anything, my perfect happy medium length of bow is about 66 inches for a 28-inch draw length. But then if you add recurves like this, you can get away with a shorter bow because the recurves reduce the string angle at full draw. So my happy medium for recurve bow is about 62 inches for a really aggressive recurve like this. For reference, this is my shortest bow that comes back to 28 inches, has very gentle recurves in the tips. This is only 58 inches long and it shoots great. This is my longest bow and it's by far the smoothest bow that I have to shoot, but it casts a really slow arrow. Another added benefit to the bow being long is that it improves accuracy. That's because it has really long straight limbs moving in a straight line. And so you just get a more consistent shot out of a really long bow as you do to a short bow. So for this piece of wood, the hickory that we're using today to make a bow, I plan on recurving it. I'm going to make it about 64 inches long. I'm also going to mark the middle of my bow, which will be 32 inches. And my handles end up being 4 inches long and then there's 2 inches on either side where the handle becomes the limb. That part's called the fade. So I mark my center and then 2 inches above, 2 inches below, and then also 4 inches above and 4 inches below. Here's something that's pretty cool about handle design. If your bow has the same handle, it shoots the same. So if you make all of your bows with roughly the same measurements on the handle. So this bow and this bow have the same width handle and the arrow rest is the same distance from center. Also my divots, where my thumb goes, is in exactly the same spot. Which means I can pick up one of these bows and get good at shooting it and then pick up the other bow and it'll shoot almost identically. But that makes it really convenient for me because I practice with a 30 pound bow and then right before I go hunting I'll pick up my 55 or 60 pound bow and take a couple shots to learn how to judge my ups and downs but don't have to relearn my lefts and rights. So I'm actually just going to take this handle and put it upside down and trace it onto the bow itself. I will try and quantify measurements of this so that you can do the same thing. See these pockets for my hand so I get a consistent grip every time and then my arrow rest is two inches above center and a quarter of an inch outside of center. So my hand pressure is not actually the center of the bow if you think about that. The thickest part of my handle is the center but the limbs are not symmetrical. The last part about drawing out my bow blank is to actually establish tapers. So now that I've drawn where the bow ends I usually measure eight inches for recurves and ten inches for longbow for where my bow goes from full width of the board of a one by two down to I like my tips to be very thin just wider than a pencil. And I'll actually use a straight edge to taper from the edge of my piece of wood down to those lines that I just drew. I've got a drawing of a bow on a piece of wood and now I just need to actually cut out all of the excess wood. If you have a nice band saw you could probably do this in just a minute or two but I'm actually going to use all hand tools. We're actually going to use this piece later so save the scrap piece when you trim your bow to length. In my head there's two different ways to actually shape wood. There's slicing wood with something sharp like a knife and then there's filing wood with something like a rasp or sandpaper. Different species of wood are easier to do different things with. So for example oak is very similar to chalk and it's hard to cut chalk with a knife it just doesn't do what you want it to do. Whereas hickory and maple are more similar to butter and they cut really good with a knife but they gum up a file. So this is a shinto rasp it's a type of Japanese sawtooth rasp and it's a very efficient way to file down wood. Then this draw knife is called a flex cut 6 inch curved draw knife and it's just a really sharp knife it's sharp right out of the box. A lot of the cheap draw knives that you get online are so thick that it's hard to get a really fine edge on them but this flex cut one is flexible and very thin so it's just easier to sharpen. Sometimes when you're cutting against the grain the wood wants to split. Hear that? My draw knife is actually catching fibers and wanting to dig down underneath them and split wood away. You have to be very careful of that and if it ever starts to split in a way that's going to go inside your lines you have to stop before it does and then go the other way with your draw knife like this and push it out. See how it's splitting there? I'll just go the other way. Problem solved. So now it looks like a bow it's got pointy tips and it's too thick to bend. That is our main problem right now. This part's a little bit tricky because depending on the length of your bow and the species of wood that you choose it'll need to be a different thickness. If I thin it too much it's going to be too weak and I won't be able to get a high poundage bow when I start tailoring it. But if I don't thin it enough at this stage then tailoring is just going to take an excessively long time. Three eighths of an inch is a good starting point. I'm going to thin my limbs to three eighths of an inch. If you're using a weaker species of wood, something softer or if you're making your bow extra long both of those factors would make you want to make your bow a little bit thicker. I'll mark three eighths of an inch and then I actually just put my pencil on that mark and put my fingernail on the bottom of the piece of wood and drag my hand back and forth. You can also use a compass if you have one. I can use my draw knife and my rasp to get this down to these lines. It needs to become thinner now. One thing that I find is that it's very difficult to use a flat draw knife or a flat rasp to remove a bunch of material and it's a lot easier if you tip your draw knife on the side and remove the corners first and then come back and remove the ridge that you created in the center. Also make sure that you're not thinning the handle part, we're going to leave that part alone. See this is my biggest gripe with rasps, especially with hickory, it just gums up all those little ribbons by getting stuck in here and then these teeth aren't really cutting. With oak that doesn't seem to happen at all but with hickory it's a huge problem. So that's why I like to use my draw knife as well. You could technically build the whole bow with just a rasp. So this is roughly a two day process for me and I want to get as much done in the first day as possible so that all I have to do the following day is tiller the bow. So I'm actually going to start a big fire in this fireplace and get a big pot of water boiling so that I can recurve these limbs tonight and then I'll glue up the handle so that tomorrow all I have to do is tiller the bow and shoot it. So I boiled the end of the limb for about 30 minutes. I found that boiling seems to work better than steaming. I think that's just because more heat is lost in the steam than if you actually just put it in the boiling water. And then I walked it over to this bending jig which is just, it's a 8 inch radius that I cut into two pieces of plywood and then glued them together and I've also got the center hollowed out so that clamps fit on it easier. There's a million ways to make bending jigs. You could actually bend it over a tin can or a round log or even your knee. You'd probably have to put some towels on your knee though so you don't burn yourself. But I actually want to leave it on this form until it's cool and dry. Not just cool but also dry. And with whitewoods like hickory it seems to hold it's shape better if you actually do that. Sometimes I like to heat it up again with the heat gun about 10 minutes to help it dry out a little bit faster. This chunk of wood is conveniently the exact same length as my handle. I want my handle to be a little bit taller than that so I'm just going to rough this up with my rasp a little bit and I'll rough up the bow where I want to glue it. I'm actually going to glue that on while this is boiling because I'm on a rush. The type of glue that I think works best is called Titebond 3 Ultimate Wood Glue. I want to completely cover the surface with wood glue. Put that on here and I'll clamp it down. Now tomorrow I can actually draw my handle design out on there from the side profile and cut out my handle. These turned out pretty nice. See those nice gentle recurves? And they're also straight forward to back. Just cool. No propeller twisting. So now I'm just going to actually thin down my handle. So I'll take this back again and trace from the side profile. I can start thinning my handle and then we can start tillering this bow and getting it ready to shoot. It won't be long before this thing is shooting. So I'm going to grab a chisel and a hammer to help me do this a little bit faster. So this is called a bow blank right now where it's not tillered but it's in the shape of a bow. And typically I like to glue on thicker knocking points but I don't like to do that until the end of the process. So what I usually do is I cut string grooves that are temporary and then tiller my bow and then I actually have to rasp out those grooves that I made and then glue something on and make new grooves. But I was just reading Traditional Bow Years Bible Volume 3 and I saw this really cool thing where they actually took wedges. So this is just like a shim and I'm going to actually cut off little wedges and then wrap those around my tips and then that little block of wood is going to hold my string on for me and be completely temporary. I'm pretty excited to try this. So now this string loop is just going to ride right there against that block. This is a tillering string and it's just a string. It's made out of bowstring material but it's just a string that does not stretch and is longer than the bow and has a loop at one end. Now you can make that out of just about anything. Don't use paracord. Paracord stretches. Even the twine that they sell at the big box store, actually they give it out for free. Like if you go to Home Depot and you buy stuff, right by the exit door there's like a big spool of twine. It's just like the twine that comes on a hay bale and it doesn't stretch. It's really great stuff. You can get it for free from Home Depot. That makes excellent bowstring material if you're really trying to save money. But if you're not, just buy bowstring material off of Amazon because it's really cheap. And since this is too long, I have to actually tie a knot at the end of it. So I'm going to make it about the same length as my bow to start with and I'm just going to tie a loop in the end. I use what's called a Bowyer's Knot, B-O-W-Y-E-R-S. You can look that up or you can watch my Bowstring Making Tutorial, which is a separate video on my channel. Now we have to bend the bow and see how it looks. See that? I can already tell that this limb is bending more than this limb. You could step on a string, like make an extra long string and step on it and bend it. And then either have a mirror or a friend mark the spots that aren't bending properly. Or you can videotape yourself and just pull it back and watch it bend. But the best setup is an actual tillering jig, which I have up on the hill. I'll show you right now. So this is basically my tillering setup. I tie a strap or a rope around my handle and I make sure that the pressure is in the exact same spot that my hand would be pushing on the bow. And then I've got a hook in this wall and I'm just going to put that on the hook. Now I've got a rope and this rope goes through a pulley on the floor and I just tie this rope around my bow, around the string. And then when I pull on the other side of the rope, it's going to tell me how this bow is bending. I've got this little fish scale, the hook on this loop. And then say if I'm making a 40 pound bow, I'm going to pull back with 40 pounds of force, see how it's bending, and then continue to make it even until it comes all the way back to my draw length. There's a line right there, that's 28 inches from the back of the bow. When you first start doing this, it's really scary. It's scary to watch the wood bend and it's scary to pull back with enough force to actually make a hunting weight bow. But my advice to you is to pull back with more force than you're comfortable with because it would be better for the bow to break at this stage than after you've been tillering for a full day. It always sucks when stuff breaks, but if you do it right, it shouldn't happen. This wood is way tougher than you think it is. So you can see, it's bending quite a bit through here. That's a nice, pretty even radius actually. But it's stiff here, which is kind of okay. And then this limb is bending a lot less than that limb is. Particularly here is almost completely straight, and maybe right in here. So I'm just going to take a crayon and scribble on this part, and then maybe right here too. Now I have to go remove wood where I made those marks. I'm just going to keep going back and forth between removing wood, bending it on this tillering setup, and seeing how it bends. This part takes a long time, you get much better with practice. This rasp is a great tool for tillering, but the problem with it is that it actually leaves little teeth marks in your bow, and eventually you're going to want this to be nice and smooth because you want it to be pretty. So you can either switch as you continue tillering to sandpaper, and then use progressively finer and finer grits of sandpaper, or you can use a flat edge. If you have a straight bladed draw knife like this one, or you can get these little cabinet scrapers, you can actually drag that across your wood like this, and it removes tiny ribbons of wood, and it leaves a really smooth finish. So you don't actually have to sand after you use one of these cabinet scrapers. So for the rest of the tillering process, since I'm getting pretty close, I'm going to use this cabinet scraper. Okay, now that we're close, I can put an actual proper length string on this. So my strings usually end up being about 3 1⁄2 inches shorter than the bow length. It's looking like a bow now, check that out. Nice and even. Let's pull back on this and see what it looks like. And you pull on it, like this, pull, like this, pull, you do it. Good job, you're tillering a bow. Okay, daddy's turn. Pretty good. That's 28 inches right there. One thing I notice is that if you use a board, dimensional lumber, to make a bow, the tillering process goes so much faster, because everything's perfectly even. But when you use a tree, there's all kinds of bumps and stuff in the wood. Right now it's drawing about 46 pounds at 28 inches, which is a perfect generalist bow. It's not too heavy to shoot a lot, but it's plenty to hunt anything up to, I'd say a whitetail deer. Now let's go shoot it. It's time to shoot this thing for the very first time. In my opinion, it's not a bow until it's shot an arrow. Nice. Let's do that again. Pretty cool. It shoots. It's a bow. Now you could call this done here, and you could leave those temporary knocking points on there, and it'd probably function for a long time. But for me, this is the halfway point. Now I like to make these bows custom. All right, final tiller check. Everything's looking good. I made a little bit of adjustments as I was polishing the bow. It's 28 inches. I'm very proud of that. Yep, 45 pounds at 28 inches. Hi, honey. Do you want to see the bow? Is Willow sleeping? We're actually going to go see mommy now. Do you want to go down the hill and see mommy? All right, let's go. Daddy. Yeah. Okay, the last thing I need to do is put true oil gunstock finish on this bow. When I'm finishing bows, there's two different types of finish. There's an oil finish, which needs to be reapplied every once in a while. And then there's a lacquer finish, which doesn't technically need to be reapplied ever if you do a good job and it doesn't chip. I think the oil finish looks better. You can kind of feel it in your hands though, and I could see certain people not liking that. But the main downside is just that it needs to be redone every so often. So if I'm selling bows to people or giving them to people that I think are not going to use them as much as I am, or treat them with as much care, I think a spar urethane or lacquer finish is better. Now it's time for montage. I'm super happy with how this bow turned out. I love the grain on this piece of wood. When you do board bows and the grain is going perpendicular to the back of the bow, I think you end up with a much prettier grain structure, especially in the handle. And this is a super smooth shooting 45 pound recurve bow. It's one of the best ones I think I've ever made. And I get a lot of people asking if I sell bows or if I'll make them a custom bow. And I've never had commercial bows available before, but I'm going to list this one starting at a dollar on my eBay page. And I'll link that in the description and also on my home page of my YouTube channel. And with any luck, maybe I'll make an extra seven dollars and be able to go do it again. Thanks for watching. I'll see you guys next week. On to the next bait.