Self Bow Building for Beginners - Complete Guide

In this step by step bow making video, Clay Hayes takes you, step by step, through how to make a hickory self bow from self bow design through tillering and finally shooting our new longbow. It is a complete guide, DIY self bow building for beginners. We start with a small hickory bow stave and use very few bow building tools to make this wooden bow. These techniques will work to build bows in the recurve bow, longbow, and flatbow designs. For this build we'll use a drawknife and farrier's rasp for the bulk of the work. We start by using the drawknife to remove the bark and cambium form the bow stave, then use a chalk line to mark center. We lay out a 64" longbow and rough it out before starting to tiller the bow. Before the final tillering, we clamp the selfbow to a form and heat treat the belly to harden it and make a more efficient weapon.

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
09:40 Bow Building Tools
10:53 Self Bow Design and Layout
18:29 Roughing the bow out
20:40 Cutting the fades
43:53 Floor Tillering
46:46 Heat Treating
52:22 Tillering
01:18:38 Handle and arrow shelf
01:25:00 Shooting

Some other videos that complement this one:
How to tie string nocks:    • Tie on STRING NOCKS  
Choosing arrows:    • How to choose the BEST ARROW for Recurve, ...  
Tuning for perfect arrow flight:    • Tuning a Recurve, longbow, or selfbow for ...  
Finish Work:    • SELF BOW Building - Sanding, Sealing, Wate...  

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