DIY High-Performance Board Longbow Build

Hey guys, thanks for joining me today, I'm going to show you how to make a

high

performance

longbow

. If you have never made a bow before, this is where I would recommend you start and if you have made bows on your own. before and you want to start with laminated arches, this is the place where I would also recommend you start and the really good thing about this type of arch is that you only need three materials, the first is a good piece of wood, the second is I need panel tape of plaster and the third thing you really need is some wood glue.

I prefer this Bond three tight wood glue because it's waterproof and these are all the materials that we're going to need to make an awesome bow really quickly and as much as possible. tools, you can use minimal tools or use power tools, it doesn't really matter because we're not removing a ton of wood. I will say that if you use power tools it is much easier to mess up the arc, so be careful and do it as slowly as possible, these three materials are really cheap and accessible. I think I bought it all for under 15, but I found that wood glue and drywall tape are much cheaper on Amazon, so I'll leave some links.

Next to make it convenient for you to find them, let's talk about the type of wood you are going to want to get to make a good solid bow. The first thing you should know is that you don't need a Get It anywhere special. You can go to the hardware store and buy a piece of wood. There are many different types of wood that will make a bow, some will make better bows and some will make worse, but it's the first thing you want. What you have to take into account is the hardness of the wood, if the wood is so soft that you can put your fingernail in the wood, it is too soft to make a bow, you will want a type of wood harder than that, the second thing Most importantly, the way the grain runs, you want the grain to run the entire length of the Bose Stave or piece of wood you are choosing.

You don't want the grain to come off the side of the wood anywhere if it comes off the side of the wood that can create a weak spot where the bow can break, but you want it to go straight down the top of the

board

and then also on the side of the

board

there are many woods that you can use at a hardware store Red oak can work well Maple can work well I'm going to try poplar today it's a hard wood, it's a very cheap wood and I think it's going to make us a really good bow for most boards in a lumber shop or in a kiln and what this means is that The drying processes were sped up by basically putting it in a kiln or in a dehumidifier and what this does is suck out the moisture of the wood very quickly.

This process is a great form of production for drying wood so you can have wood to

build

a house. or do construction because you don't want the wood to shrink after you lay the floor, but the problem with this with arches is that it dries the wood so quickly that it can make the wood brittle because with an arch we need good compression and tension because we are bending the bow it will not be a static piece when we are bending this bow the back of the bow is under tension and the belly is under compression so brittleness can be really bad and that is exactly why we are going Add an arch backrest to the back of this arch.

Now there are several arch backs that you can use and I have a video on 10 arch backs that really work, but today we're going to use my favorite arch back, which is this fiberglass. drywall tape is really easy to use, it's extremely cheap and so durable that there really is nothing better than it before we go ahead and attach the arch backing to the arch what we need to do is extend the arch and leave it on rough. shape that we want and if you want to follow this, I have a free PDF download for you that shows you all the dimensions and it is something that you may want to print out or save on your phone so that when you are

build

ing the arch, you can refer to it to know where to place the handle.

Remember all the little things that are easy to forget when making your first bow. Let's get right into the design of this bow as you begin to place the bow on the piece. of wood you want to look for defects to try to avoid them and one end of the piece of wood I have has a split and that is the side I am going to cut. I want a 64 inch bow, this entire bow is six feet long, so 72 inches, so I'm going to cut the side that has the split so I can avoid that and we'll use that extra side that we cut to reinforce the handle section , the first thing you want to do is find the center of the bow, which in my case will be 32 inches for a 64 inch bow handle section and where we want the center of the bow to be where the most pressure is placed on the grip, so on a finished bow like This right here, where there is the most pressure, is where the center of the bow should be and that will be an inch and a quarter below the arrow rest, so we have already found the center of the boat, which It's right here, so we need to measure. up an inch and a quarter to mark the arrow rest, so now we mark the center of the bow and then we go up an inch and a quarter to the air rest, now we are going to mark two and three quarter inches and that.

It will give us a four inch handle section. Now that we have our four inch handle section, from there we need to create our fades, so we are going to make two inch fades on each side, this should create a total of eight inches. handle that is exactly the same size as our scrap piece, so we can glue it together to make a thicker handle section. Okay, so we've got our two inch fades in the center of the bow and the four inch shaft as far as the limbs go. We're going to keep a very simple design, our limbs come out at 27 inches, so we're going to find the midpoint of 27, which should be 13 and a half, so that's going to be the midpoint of our limb, so we're going to keep that limb about an inch and a half wide, but when we get to the middle of the point, we will make it thinner and reduce it to three-quarters of an inch, which will make the tips of the limbs much thinner, which Let's make our bow much faster, so let's find the center from here, which should be three quarters and then half of three quarters is three eighths, so take it 3 8 either side of the center from here.

I'm going to use a ruler to mark my lines. If you made this bow design correctly, your top rail will be longer than your bottom limb. The reason is we have this whole extra shaft section at the bottom because your arrows will be correct. up here, so your top end is going to be an inch and a half longer and that's completely fine, we're going to need the top end to bend a little more than the bottom end at the end to get a smooth pull. I need to interrupt very quickly. To let you know that we now have a website and on that website we don't sell t-shirts but we sell bowstrings, something that can benefit me and you at the same time, so if you want to support.

For this channel, head over to krameremons.com or click the link below to pick up the bowstring. They are flamenco bowstrings. I make them with a Dacron decron decron decron cover string and I also have a hybrid bowstring if you want something with a little more speed and a little more. I have three cell phone bowstrings. I will custom make the length and the whole website is 40 off, so if you need bowstring or tillering string, please visit kramerrams.com, pick it up yourself. a bowstring, I would appreciate it and I know you would like it too.

Oh and if you already have a bowstring that is completely fine, go ahead and visit kramerrams.com, buy a bowstring that way the one you have now can become your backup and you can have a new mainstream, come on now Same, going back to the arch construction designs, it can sometimes be difficult to understand, so I'll walk you through this one more time, first we find the center of the arch and then from there. We go up an inch and a quarter, that's where the arrow rest will be and then we go down from that point four inches, which will be our entire shaft section, so it will be an inch and a quarter up or if you're going to measure. from the center line which will be two and three quarters down either way you have a four inch section from there we have the two inch fades and another two inch fade then go down the branch to the middle of the branch you will make a mark and then from there you'll fade to three quarters of an inch.

It will be the same on this other side up to the middle of the limb. It will fade up to three. quarter inch, if you want all of these measurements again they will be in the free PDF download for you, at this point we are going to glue the piece of wood to the back of the bow, this will give us a much thicker section of handle to work with and prevent the handle from bending. These two pieces of wood are extremely flat, so I don't need to sand or smooth them anymore, but what I will do is grab a hacksaw blade and rough up these two surfaces so I can have more gluing surface.

I want to give myself every chance to not let these two pieces of wood come apart, oh man, that's so brittle when you have really dry wood like this, a coat of sizing is The important thing is that the whole coat of sizing is just putting a little bit on it. of glue and let it penetrate the dry wood. If all you do is put on a quick coat of glue and clamp it in place, a lot of it will soak into the wood, so go ahead. and apply a coat of primer, let it sit there for five minutes and it will get tacky once the glue gets tacky, then go ahead and put one more coat of glue on both sides of the wood and then clamp it down.

I've found this helps especially when you're using dry wood to hold the laminations together for a long period of time, okay it's sticky so let's go ahead and give it another coat of glue and then clamp this down. Something interesting of this type. The glue hardens in 30 minutes. I think I'm going to leave it a little longer, but I'll leave it for about an hour with the clamps on and then I can go ahead and put the arch back on the same day, then all I have to do is wait 24 hours to finish monkey. You don't have to do it in different steps.

Like gluing the handle, waiting a couple of days and then gluing the back of the bow, he says no. stress it for 24 hours, which we won't do. They will have a tight enough bond that we can remove the clamps so we can put the arch backing on with a glue like this. Your clamps do not have to be extremely tight. If you don't have clamps you can wrap it with tape very tightly or you can just place a brick on top or something and that should work fine. These Factory cabinet boards are actually very straight so all you need is a little clamping pressure and it should hold for you too if you wipe off the glue while it's wet it will make it a lot easier.

We're going to go ahead and let this dry and then we'll move on to the arch backing. Ok, I got everything ready to glue and I put down some wax paper and then placed the fiberglass strips. These are very easy to put on, you just want to unravel this, make it the length of your bow, you want six strips and then you want to make three bundles of two to end up with three bundles but there are two in each bundle, it goes much faster that way in instead of applying six individual strips. I'm going to go ahead and do another carving layer like we did before.

On the handle I decided not to shave the profile of the bow since it is such a flat board that we will be able to put the fiberglass tape on without holding it, just lay it completely flat, which is a thumbs up for not having to act like an ace. Wrap it or something because then it gets a lot messier, but if I can keep it flat like this without rounding the corners, I can just put the fiberglass tape on and it will make it a lot cleaner and a lot easier. to do and then we'll trim out the profile of the bow, so I'm going to go ahead and do a size coat like I did on the handle, just a very thin coat of glue, let it get tacky and then apply the fiberglass all the way to the first layer, we are very good and sticky, it has absorbed a lot of glue.

I prefer to go over with the glue than under the first fiberglass tape, extremely easy to install. To make sure it doesn't have wrinkles or anything like that, I have to rub the fiberglass tape. The goal is to get all the little holes out, so if you see little holes inside the fiberglass tape, there is no glue, put more glue on it. poke it in with your finger and then at that point when each indentation is full add the next layer of tape. It looks like we're in pretty good shape down here. The fiberglass tape came out nice and smooth.

That wood is so flat that it was just laid down. Flat there it looked great and I was able to get every crack out of that fiberglass tape by putting more glue in there andsmoothing it out, I got all the wrinkles out and I think this is going to make a really good bow and I'm really excited about it but we have to wait until it dries 24 hours before we can stress it out so I'll see you tomorrow welcome to a new day . We gave this bow plenty of time to dry. There are a couple of dark spots. and that's just because I put too much glue in that area and that's completely fine, what we need to do next is give this bow its rough shape, so let's get right to it, start bringing down the tips of the limbs and remove the excess. fiberglass so now that the profile is more or less similar to what we are going to have when we finish it will be a little thinner because we are going to clean it but in the belly of the bow we want to remove enough wood so that we can bend it with our hands in the soil, this is a process It's called floor tillering and you don't bend it very much, but you just want to make sure that your curvature is even on both ends, then we can move on to the tillering process, so now you're just hogging a little bit of the excess of wood in the belly. little on the handle and after that we can really get into the fun stuff no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no what's up strange easy mistake to make is going down one side more than the other, so the solution is to draw an even line along the entire length of the branch on both sides and then when you lower the wood, just lower it to the line and I know you will be the same on both sides, but you need to check both sides very often because it is not good to take one side down very far, leave the other side, the

high

foreign ER is the hard wood, the wood is very soft.

I would say it's just a little harder than pine, so what that means is that this wood is very easy to work with, but it won't produce the fastest shooting bow you can make. We have the arch shaped and we have it lower. The handle section turned out really good and you can barely see the transition between our glue UPS, so everything looks really good, so now it's time to start thinking about putting a string on it and to put a string on it. arc, we need to cut the hits, so let's jump in and cut the hits right now, everyone probably has their own way of cutting the hits, but this is how I like to do it.

I'll go down about three-quarters of an inch and make a mark. Now we have the back of the bow here, the belly of the bow on this side, so the handle will be on this side. You always want it to be leaning towards the handle I made. A bow was going in the wrong direction when I started, so always start at the back of the bow and face toward the handle. Some people observe this. Some people prefer to use a square, what we want is a 45 degree angle from the back of the arch. to the belly of the arch and then from there I'm going to go forward a little bit and give myself another line, so right between those two lines is where I'm going to cut the slot.

I'll match this on the opposite side. What I used to cut is a chainsaw file. I think they are very easy, they can get clogged, but it is the perfect bowstring thickness. Start slow to make it work. You want to cut the knot to the width of the bowstring so there is a little bump there on the bowstring, so it's not deep enough, but it looks perfect now it's just a matter of repeating this bump on the other side. The most important thing when cutting strokes is that you need them to be even. each other because if one let's say I made my other hit.

Loop down, for example, I have a hit. Loop here, one hit. Loop down, what's going to happen is it's not going to pull the limb evenly and it's going to cause this limb to twist like this, so you don't want that limb to twist in your bow, so it's not necessarily important how much high is your hit point, but it is very vital that your hit points are aligned. The fiberglass tape has that grid pattern, so you can follow it instead of squaring it before cutting the second stroke. Make sure you look at the other side to see if they line up.

We look good, thank you. Okay, so we're at my favorite part. In the bow making process, we technically have a board right now for a staff and since we're starting to string it, this is the process of turning it into an actual bow. This process is called tillering and all tillering takes place. Remove the wood in the belly of the bow to make the limbs bend evenly, so putting a board back on a bow right now is why I like it so much because it gets so exciting and stressful when you start bending the arc. There are a couple of tips. or techniques that will help you if this is your first time working with tillers, the first thing you should know is that you don't necessarily need special tools to tiller, you can do it for the most part with floor tillers and then once you have a rope Pull Bow back in a mirror and you can look to see if the limbs bend evenly.

However, it helps to have some tools like a tiller. It only has a notch on the top of the board and not just everywhere, so you can lower the bow and you can step back. I can watch the band. The only negative about this is that you don't want to leave the bow bent a large distance downward for a long period of time, that will only damage the bow. undue stress and if you want what I think is the best way, you can use a tillering board and I will soon make one of those here, but it's basically the same as a tillering tree except you have some pulleys and a longer rope. attached to it so you can step back and pull the bow down and just watch it bend, it's much better for exercising your limbs and gives you a better perspective to see how your limbs bend, but for today we're going to use the bow tree. tillering and my favorite method to see where we need to remove the wood is to just grab any straight edge, it could even be a small block of wood, but I like to rub it on the belly of the bow and you want the gap. the straightedge should be even across the branch, this makes it easy to see where you need to remove the wood and wherever the gap isn't level, I'll just take a pencil and mark it right there and then I know I need to do it.

Remove the wood right where my pencil lines are. This is a sure way to ensure that your limb bends evenly. That's what I'm going to do now. I'm going to use a scraper and a pencil, mark it and then just take. Remove some wood and continue doing this until we can put a real rope on it. The rope we have now is called tillering rope. If you want a proper tillering rope, I have these for cellular on the website. so wound on one end and there's just a knot on the other end, it allows you to tie a knot of yours on this side at any distance you need so you can use the same tillering thread for every bow you make, we're just going to have the tillering rope until we get the limbs to bend about six inches, only once they bend about six inches then we want to put real rope on it as soon as possible, the limbs will bend a little differently once we move on from a tillering rope to a real rope so we want to get to that real rope as soon as possible the storm has come but I'm prepared for a while but don't be scared we're still alive I'll be happy for the ride in the black hole you want the truth but if I tell you now the sun dies in the black hole sing for my soul again i'm a down to earth person if i start getting dizzy when i make bows we're I'm going to string this for the first time at full stand height and this is always stressful.

We have a bow, once you put a string on it, you officially have a bow that will be about the full height of the stand right now. It probably weighs like 50 pounds with a 15 inch draw length, but once it reaches the height of the stand, it moves very fast, so slow down when removing the wood, just slow down, this is the time, yeah There is some time in this process, to take your time. At that point, most people, when they make a bow for the first time, end up with a much lower weight than they really wanted to end up with.

To check if the limbs are level with each other you can take a tape measure and measure from the inside of the belly to the deepest point you have seven and a quarter inches on that side this is seven and three eighths so we can know which limb is bottom that bends more, you'll want both limbs to bend the same before you continue removing wood on both limbs every time I'm at this point in a bow build. I always move down only to a scraper. I have a little cabinet scraper here and plus I'm just going to use sandpaper to remove a little bit of the wood.

It will change the curvature a lot, but it's something you have to be careful with after you remove the wood. Wood has memory and this can be problematic for us Bowers because once we remove the wood, you don't necessarily realize that that wood was moved immediately, so Bowers We do something we call exercising the bow limbs and you can Do it by simply pulling the bow and moving the limbs and this is something you should do between each time you remove some wood because you can remove the wood in one place. on your tillage tree, take it down and it shows no correction, so you do it again, take it down without correction and suddenly you have a big hinge right there because the wood finally caught, so you have to try it. get it back anywhere else and you're just rocking back and forth, but if you exercise your limbs you'll avoid that problem, it's a time consuming process, but if you don't take the time to do it you'll regret it.

You also have to keep in mind the position of your handle because if I put the handle right in the middle, it's not like we're going to draw it, so I'm going to put the tillering tree right where my hand would go and then draw. From there, that will make the helm as realistic as possible. If we place the handle in the center, where my hand won't actually be, the limbs will bend a little differently and we want it to bend exactly the same way. This is when we shoot the bow so we can have a really good boom, high

performance

when you exercise the limbs.

There is a point where you can feel it like hitting a wall. Don't go over that wall because that's where. You want to break 20 to 30 draws are usually enough for the wood to forget the old memory and now remember the new memory, which is the most recent wood you removed. Om, let's keep adjusting the last moment. Tillering will take a while. so I'm going to show you about two hours of work in about 20 seconds foreign foreign I've got the rudder where I like it I think it looks pretty good our next step is to shape the handle and our hit points, both of which are About 100 personal preferences one thing One thing to keep in mind is that if you decide to cut an arrow rest, don't cut it too far away and never cut it further than the center when using a wooden bow.

One option is to just shoot it right from your hand I like an arrow rest if I can put it on there if I feel like I have enough wood since we added another piece of wood to make it thicker and this handle doesn't bend we should be good to go and cut a small arrow rest and then the hitting point. I like to round my butt. Hit it on top. I like to make it pointed, which makes it really quick and easy to identify which is the top of the bone. What is the bottom? of the bow, so I'm very excited because we are very close to shooting this bow.

The last thing I'm going to do after that is paint and stain it again. Personal preference for all that from now on. but it's definitely time to end this. I can't wait to see how it shoots and how fast it goes, so without further ado, let's do this foreigner, thank you, thank you, foreigner, thank you, foreigner for a second, that even impressed me. If you watched any of my hunting videos earlier this year, that was all with a 150 feet per second bow, eight feet per second faster, a standard bow, that's pretty crazy. I'm telling you, this fiberglass tape backing is like the biggest secret in the bow. do and if you need a bowstring, go to the website, pick one up, that's a good way to support me on this YouTube channel, as well as supporting you, by giving you a very high quality bowstring, go out, make a bow, have fun.

Stay positive, see you next time thanks for watching.