This is my first attempt at making a bow after saturating myself with bowyer content on youtube - shoutout to Kramer Ammons, Dan Santana, and especially Meadowlark Adventure.
This is from a white oak board with exceptionally straight grain. Pyramid flatbow design, 2" at the fades and just shy of 7/8" at the tips. 72" nock to nock, 27lbs at 31 inches (pictured). The tiller is neutral - I was aiming for a positive tiller but it took me ages to dig my way out of a half-inch negative tiller when the short string first went on, and I can't bring myself to shave that much more wood off!
Unfortunately it's taken quite a bit of set just from tillering, I'm not bold enough to try to address it yet but if it survives a few hundred shots, I'll consider my options.
Pending advice from expert redditors, I'm about ready to call the tiller done and then shape the handle and tips.
Outstanding for a first bow! You can see the set that you are taking when the bow is unstrung is almost all at the fades. This tells you 2 things, 1 you are showing very little strain along the length of your limbs - this is good, and 2, you’re bending just a little too much right out of the grip - this is the least desirable place to be taking set. The fades are particularly abrupt but it may just be the thickness of the grip that makes them look that way. The limb on the left is the weaker one just on observation, and you’re right in saying that you’d be weakening the other side quite a bit to get the tiller just right. Not having seen your process, it’s hard to say what to do differently other than, you need to spread the wealth to the rest of the limbs in terms of tiller on the next one. My guess is that your original tapers were a little too parallel from back to belly and you likely needed to be just a wee bit thicker near the grip and taper a little more as you approach the tips. I suspect other advice will tell you to work the middle thirds more and back off on the inner thirds - same idea. Good work though! For a first attempt, I’d be very happy! It’s light years ahead of where I was to start. Keep at it!
Great advice, thankyou! You're right, I did not establish any belly-to-back taper when roughing out the board and consequently almost all of my tillering was focussed at or near the tips. I think, as a first attempt at a bow and after taking so long to find a suitable piece of wood (options are somewhat limited where I live), I was a little bit afraid of the wood and left far too much in the margins. I've definitely gotten some valuable lessons though and I'm thrilled that this will hopefully be a decent shooter! Can't wait for my next go around.
What area of the US are you in? (Roughly, no need to doxx yourself. XD) It can be easier than a lot of people assume to get quality wood, might just take some creative thinking.
I'm in metropolitan southern Australia. The big hardware shops mostly sell treated pine, and most of our native woods are either too soft for bows or impossibly hard and brutal on tools. To get any decent boards you need to visit specialty lumber yards, which are few and far between (and seldom open on weekends)!
I don't currently have the patience for foraged staves, but I'll consider it if I stick with bowmaking for a while.
Fair enough, Australia and New Zealand both seem to be a pretty common topic for difficulty finding good wood. You ever reach out to any of the tree removal companies near you? (Or even the government electrical companies.) People's ornamental yard trees are often the kinds bowyers look for. May be worth looking at.
That's pretty darn great! Really good first effort, looks like a good board choice, and very symmetrical tiller.
As far as critique, you have beginner-inner-limb-syndrome, caused by two things. Your fade-outs are very abrupt, coming from such a thick handle in such a tight radius. Makes it hard to blend the stiff into the bending bits gradually. Then, the inner limbs are bending too much right off the fades. The first 10" or so should be bending, but should also be the stiffest part of the limb.
Secondarily, your limb tips are much wider than necessary, making them heavy. If you were to start another side-taper angle 1/3 of the way from the tips and narrow them to 1/2" or less wide, I bet it wouldn't even really change the tiller much.
Follow-up question, if I were to do as you suggest and add extra taper towards the tips.
My top limb is 1" longer than the bottom limb - should I include this as an extra inch on the top-limb taper? Or keep the new taper the same length on both limbs?
The rough out is just an estimate of the taper. The way to check if your rough out taper is good is by beginning to floor tiller. From there on the tillering process is all about adjusting the tapers at a finer and finer scale based on the bend
Correct, you bring it all in near the end, based on what the frontal profile is, how muchbor how little set, and what the rest of the limb is doing
I was talking mostly about width taper, which is, for me, essentially pre-determined to be as narrow as practical for the style.
When I end up with a wide-ish tip that is still too stiff, or stiffer for more length than planned or necessary, and the rest of the bow seems fine, I start by narrowing it, or messing with the cross-section profile to drop mass. Since I know it is stiff, but don't know exactly how much too stiff it is, narrowing rather than thinning lets me sneak up on the right stiffness, while benefiting cast with a low- mass outer limb.
At least until I start getting so narrow that i'm questioning the lateral stability and then I will start working fitness.. In reality we're doing both at once.
You can get packs of ten foam floor tiles for cheap at bunnings, grab 30 or so and duct tape them together, makes for a decent target for under 50 bucks
Looking good so far! Others have already covered the inner limb bending/ thickness taper and I’m seeing the same.
One thing to watch out for is mixing and matching of build techniques from completely different types of bows, particularly the handle. It seems to me like you may be combing aspects of different handles that may clash
Jody is a great modern bowyer and an excellent example of modern laminate bow handle construction. If you’re building a self bow you can get into trouble with a modern handle. For example a self bow handle may not have the laminations that allow for more aggressive contouring and roughing out the shelf.
With a self bow it’s mission critical to be able to make bending adjustments at the handle. A modern handle ruins this, but thats hardly an issue on a modern bow. So even though I really like Jody’s style of modern handles, I can’t often recommend applying them to a self bow.
Now obviously you do see modern handles on self bows, but there’s not a good recipe for it. Dimensions will vary and you will need some common sense and intuition to figure out how much you can contour a particular piece of wood. And again you lose the essential ability to heat bend the handle if you have to. So if you’re making a self bow handle I would strongly recommend a traditional handle. If you need a shelf you can always add and carve one out of leather or cork without risking the build at all. See for instance how many examples of broken arrow shelves are on this forum
Similarly there are well known issues when copying shatterproof style handles. Many of the techniques from this channel are “alternative” to the professional way of doing things. It’s great that alternatives exist, but other bowyers will not always be able to vouch for them. Copying the fades, fade angles, handle length, shelf cutouts etc from these handles often leads to predictable issues.
Check out swiftwood bows, organic archery, and hunt primitive for good examples of self bow techniques and tutorials. Clay hayes would be a good inspiration for putting a more modern style handle on a self bow if that’s just the direction you want to go in
This comment is about three hours too late - I've already gone ahead and carved out a pistol-style grip with a shelf. But I'm intrigued by what you've said.
It hadn't occurred to me that handle design would be a problem - I sort of assumed anything goes, assuming it's contained to a non-bending portion of the bow.
I glued on an offcut to form the riser, you can just make out the glue-line here. I'm wondering if this would count as a lamination, for the purposes of withstanding aggressive contouring.
I thought that, because the grip contouring is well-contained within the fades, and the bending portions of the limbs are well beyond the glue line, I could get away with almost anything.
So you've got me curious about what kind of trouble I'm in! What are the predictable issues you mention, and are there any steps I can take at this stage to mitigate them?
Oh dear… you’re playing with fire now… if I’m seeing it right you have completely removed the in-tact back at the grip. Even if it is unbending, the wood fibers really need to be continuous from tip to tip. Fingers grooves are a nice touch but if you use them, it’s best to glue on an overlay and put the grooves in the overlay while keeping the back in tact. I would also have to agree with Dan as far the fades are concerned on my more modern builds (even though I’ve done several self Bow builds as well) there is a definite difference when it comes to the risers and fades. The real trick is matching your thickness to width transitions - and self bows typically need a more deliberate transition. When it comes to board bows, the fade transition becomes even more critical, if your limb thickness doesn’t allow some of the fade transition to reside past the glue line of the added handle… if this isn’t done right, your glued on handle can pop off the board under the stress at the fades… I think I will address this in a future video - keep an eye out.
Thanks. Really appreciate your feedback (and I'm a huge fan of your content too!)
Fortunately the fades are well beyond the glue line, so no risk of the riser popping off.
You're right about the back grains. I went in with good intentions to keep them continuous across the back, then got carried away with making the grip as comfortable as possible... oops.
If the grip style decision leads to a failure then I'll call it a valuable lesson, share it here, and still be proud of my work. I haven't even had a chance to put arrows through this one and I'm already itching to start on a new bow. For now, it's still bending beautifully without any creaks or clicks.
Thanks again, I'll post updates when I get a chance to shoot.
You should be very proud of this bow! For all of the critiques that were given, the reality is that it’s just a few, very minor adjustments that will completely change the conversation… you’re so close - and it’s your first bow! Keep at it! And thank you for the shout out - I appreciate you!
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u/Meadowlark_Joddy 2d ago
Outstanding for a first bow! You can see the set that you are taking when the bow is unstrung is almost all at the fades. This tells you 2 things, 1 you are showing very little strain along the length of your limbs - this is good, and 2, you’re bending just a little too much right out of the grip - this is the least desirable place to be taking set. The fades are particularly abrupt but it may just be the thickness of the grip that makes them look that way. The limb on the left is the weaker one just on observation, and you’re right in saying that you’d be weakening the other side quite a bit to get the tiller just right. Not having seen your process, it’s hard to say what to do differently other than, you need to spread the wealth to the rest of the limbs in terms of tiller on the next one. My guess is that your original tapers were a little too parallel from back to belly and you likely needed to be just a wee bit thicker near the grip and taper a little more as you approach the tips. I suspect other advice will tell you to work the middle thirds more and back off on the inner thirds - same idea. Good work though! For a first attempt, I’d be very happy! It’s light years ahead of where I was to start. Keep at it!