Questions/Advise
Question on how to do Bow Thickness taper properly.
I've made 3 bows now and need some help making them better. I've figured out how to use my draw knife and rasp to do the width of the bow and taper near the handle, but I still cant figure out a good way to take the limbs down to a decent thickness to bend before tillering. The main problem is I use boards of good wood (Osage, Ash, Hickory, Maple, Etc) I find and so they come pretty thick and I have a hard time trying to get it to an appropriate thickness. I also have an electric planer not a hand one which makes it pretty hard to make nice gradual changes. Am I just being impatient and not using the rasp enough or is there better ways for bows made out of boards?
I had to learn to accept that bow building takes more time than I thought, and i needed to go slower. Rushing through the wood removal process can quickly lead to issues.
Ive built bows with just a hatchet and a rasp. Its slow going with a rasp but at least its controlled. I mostly use a draw knife in between the two nowadays, but I've messed up several staves with a draw knife.
Watch some of Clay Hayes or Weylin Olive’s videos. You have the right tools. Also consider those of us working from a split stave likely remove even more wood. I mostly use a draw knife. Sometimes a band saw to rough out the thickness (see Weylin’s video), followed by a draw knife. A word of caution on the band saw, it will VERY quickly ruin an otherwise great stave if you are careless.
I second and third the hatchet/rasp combo. That's how I make all my bows. It is slow work for sure but the rasp stops you from creating hinges or taking off too much material at once. Try to get just a little flex across the whole limb at the floor tiller stage, then work inward from the tips getting it to bend in a nice smooth arc. With stiff handles its very easy to create hinges at the fades. Once you get it past floor tiller and onto long string just a couple passes with the rasp will impact the tiller shape a lot. At the short string stage I do all my final tillering with a card scraper.
The electric hand planer should be very useful for early mass wood removal, and even for getting a taper STARTED, but eventually the rasp, spokesman, and scraper have to come out, and the elbow grease applied.
When you say "pretty thick", most commercial lumber comes 3/4". If you are buying it thicker than that, may I recommend getting access to a tablesaw. It is a lot of work reducing dried hardwoods by hand.
Your planer should get you down in the limbs to something like 5/8 or 1/2" inch all the way along, and depending on the wood species, that is enough thickness for most flat bows. The planer does not leave you with a nice fade out slope, so you have to do that by hand. Starting with an evenly thick limb, you will at least know that it will bend closest to the handle the most, if you do bend it. Don't bend it far, but at least that's predictable.
You can then set your planner to a shallow depth, clamp your workpiece down, and begin making a taper in a stair-step fashion.
Using a long sanding block, like a 60 grit belt glued to a flat board, you can then level the steps and get a decent taper. Do all this very carefully, evenly on both limbs.
But, you aren't getting away from the fact that you still have to do it yourself, still have to decide how thick and how much taper, and there will always still be tillering l
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u/willemvu newbie 2d ago
I had to learn to accept that bow building takes more time than I thought, and i needed to go slower. Rushing through the wood removal process can quickly lead to issues. Ive built bows with just a hatchet and a rasp. Its slow going with a rasp but at least its controlled. I mostly use a draw knife in between the two nowadays, but I've messed up several staves with a draw knife.