Selfbows

I spent the weekend at the Morgantown Conservation Club. A bunch of guys busy making selfbows all weekend. Good food too!.
Indiana Bow Bee

I made a few adjustments. I moved the head forward, which gives me a better foot angle and also works better for thinner pieces. Adding the cushion lets me raise the angle on the work surface and gives me better clearance between the pedal and the floor (and lets me sit longer :). I'll probably make a few more adjustments. 

Here's my new shavehorse I made over the weekend. I had some scrap laying around and just used what I had. It works pretty good. We are having a "bow bee" next weekend and needed some way to hold down the staves.

Folded down for transport 

I got this stave bending a little today and decided to reflex it a little with a heat gun. 

Straightening 

Here's some pictures of my dry wood, long staves and billets that I'll splice into longer pieces. These were cut 3-6 years ago. There's some locust that were cut last spring too. I always seal the ends of the log as soon as it's cut with shellac which dries fast and stops the moisture from running out the ends. This is most important when the sap is up. Moisture leaving the ends is what causes drying checks or cracks in the log. I split them at least in half so the wood can lose moisture through the split side. The bark keeps the moisture from leaving through the outer side. A split needs to be 3 or more inches across the bark side and at least 3 inches deep. Now that I have a bandsaw I can use a lot of marginal wood. It's a lot easier to find a 3-4' straight section in most trees.

Dried osage.

Here are some bows in progress and some finished bows. First on the left is about 63 inches long. I'm shooting for 65 pounds on that one. Second is from a green half log from a young tree. I'll steam it to straighten it. It's got shellac on the back to keep from checking. The third is from a Kentucky log that dried for ten years before splitting. It split like a watermellon and has drying cracks in the back. Fourth is a kid's bow that was real crooked and knotty. It's a lot straighter now after heating and straightening. The fifth is my hunting bow from that Kentucky log. It's about 65 inches and pulls 78 pounds at 27 1/2 inches. The sixth is my grown daughter's bow. The seventh is spliced from some twisted Tennessee sister billets and will be Ruth's bow.