Author Archives: Mark Ruff

Holly Heat Treated Self Bow 40#@28″ (Bow No. 10)

I’ve had the stave this bow came from hanging in the rafters for at least three years and to be honest, I can’t for the life of me remember where it came from. Every time I moved it out the way to get to a different stave it would catch my attention. I love making bows from holly as it is excellent bow wood (if you can find a clean straight bit that is!) But every time I inspected this particular stave I’d be reminded of the bloody great chainsaw cut which was three parts of the way through the belly of what would end up being one of the limbs outer 1/3 sections. (Bloody tree surgeons!) And that is why this particular stave kept getting put back in the rafters!

There was little intact belly wood remaining usable at this cut point, which led me to believe that the likelihood of this stave making a bow over 20lbs was low. So with those thoughts in my head I decided to quickly chop down to the bottom of the saw cut to see exactly how much wood remained intact. If there wasn’t enough I’d just scrap the stave and make space in the rafters.

But after 10 mins with the axe I was able to see that there was actually a little bit more wood left behind than I first thought, although definitely not enough to make a hunting weight bow. Enthused by this discovery I roughed out a basic profile and limb thickness to see exactly what I was able to play with. About 8mm of wood was all of what remained just outside of where the static tip fade would end and the working part of the outer limb would start. Not Ideal!

After completing the roughing out of both limbs, I set to tillering the stave to brace height. At this point I could see that some fairly minor propeller twist and string alignment issues would need resolving before taking the tiller much further. At this point it was already apparent that the weight was going to end up pretty low so I thought I’d have a go at fixing all the bending and twisting issues whilst at the same time adding a few more pounds of draw weight through heat treating the belly of the stave. The heat treatment took place whilst the stave was clamped strategically into an optimal position on a form with a touch of reflex. And it worked out pretty well! After taking a blow torch to the entire belly for half an hour, nearly all of the propeller twist came out, and the string alignment was resolved to. And all whilst adding a good 5 or 6lbs of well received draw weight too! Bonus!!

After tillering down to 26” on the tree I was now getting about 40lbs ish on the scale. So with a slightly whippy positive tiller I decided to shoot in the last couple of inches rather than pulling her down to 28” on the tillering tree. I often find that I’m best doing this towards the end of the tillering process as lets face it, the way we pull on a bow when actually shooting it is really quite different to how the bow is stressed on a tillering tree.

After a couple of hundred arrows I checked the tiller and all looked good so I finished sanding her down which knocked a pound or so off and left her pulling 40lbs at 28”. The positive tiller held good and I was pleased to have managed to pull off a sweet shooting light weight selfy, which actually looks quite good. I really like the contrast between the light and dark of the back and belly. Buffalow horn tip overlays also contrast sharply with the light wood of the back.

I finished the handle with some really nice thick wild red deer rawhide which I processed myself from a neck cape which came from a stag I shot back in the autumn. After re-wetting the rawhide and forming it around the contoured grip I let it dry for a couple of days. Once dry it got trimmed, punched, stained and glued/sewn back on. I dyed the rawhide dark tan with an impressive product which is new to me, Leather Dye WB – Furniture Clinic. I’ll certainly be using this product again as it works extremely well on rawhide. It’s a water based leather stain and soaks into both dry and wet rawhide amazingly. It penetrates really deep and dries quickly too and once dry it doesn’t rub off either unlike many other leather stains I’ve used before. And as it is a water based stain, you can oil over the stain to leave the whole thing totally water proof and looking like traditionally tanned leather. After a single coating of the leather stain I gave this particular handle covering along with the rest of the bow 6 coats of tung oil. Each coat being left a couple of days between coats to soak right in. I love the satin finish tung oil gives and I think that it sometimes suits certain bows better than the usual glossy Truoil type finishes. The handle covering is glued in situ with Titebond III.

The string is 12 strands of B55 and the silencers are Wild Beaver fur.

This bow would make a great ladies/tennagers primitive longbow and will be listed for sale on my ETSY Shop very soon. My Shop can be found here: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/Southmoorbows?ref=l2-about-shopname

Stats are as follows:

Mass: 554 grams

Length NTN: 62”

Width: 1 ¾” at widest part

Tips: 4” static 3/8” wide

Back: Moderately crowned with valleys. : Pyramidal face profile

Belly Profile: Undulating between flat and concaved to mirror the bows back.

Tiller: Lightly whipped. 1/8” positive

Brace height: 5 1/2″

Draw Weight: 40lbs at 28”

Here are the pics. Hope you like her!

Sinew and Snake Skin Backed Yew Recurve 50# @ 28″

After a break spanning a few years, I’ve been experimenting with snake skins again recently. I love snake skins as a backing material as, in my opinion, they look amazing and are fairly simple to apply if you know what you’re doing. Admittedly my first couple of attempts to apply snake skins to a bow where less than perfect. But I’ve got a system in place now which is simple and effective and seems to work very well for me. At some point in the future I’ll do an article on my own quick and simple way of applying snakes skins.

The only trouble I find with snake skins is trying to source them here in the UK. I once paid an absolute arm and a leg to import a pair of Western Diamondback skins from the USA. As beautiful as those skins were, I simply can’t justify the cost of getting skins from traditional species of North American snakes into the UK these days. So I’ve started to use skins from Asiatic snake species instead.

The skins shown in the pics below are imported from Asia and are from a very common species of snake loosely referred to as the Asian King Ratsnake – Elaphe carinata. In terms of their conservation status these snakes are currently ranked (LC-least Concern) by the IUCN- See here: Elaphe carinata – Wikipedia. Whilst there is no doubt that these skins are not as pretty as skins from something like a North American rattle snake or even a Boa, I still think they look pretty amazing! And these Asian skins cost a mere fraction of the price of a pair of rattler or Boa skins!!

The bow featured in this post is one of my older sinew backed Yew recurves. A friend of mine asked me a while back if I had a hunting weight primitive bow which a mate of his could buy from me to hunt deer with. (Not here I hasten to add!!) This particular bow was one of my favourite stumping bows. It’s compact enough to be woven through the scrub and it certainly packs plenty enough punch to deliver appropriately weighted arrows for a lethal shot on a deer sized target.

Since this particular bow has seen many hundreds, if not thousands of arrows through it I can reliably say with certainty that this bow will withstand a lot of use and abuse, so I offered this bow to the avid hunter after re finishing it for the guy with the addition of a snake skin backing to provide an aesthetic upgrade, as well as a modest camo effect.

I also replaced the fairly battered old leather handle with my new favourite cover material – home processed and prepared deer rawhide. What an amazing handle cover material deer rawhide is! Not only does it look great after staining (note the marbled like effect from using a dark leather stain wiped off with pure isopropyl alcohol), but it’s also an incredibly hard wearing material. Deer rawhide must be sealed though else it will absorb water, but that’s no problem as raw hide will also take an oil finish like Truoil or Tung oil really well so you can oil finish/waterproof the handle at the same time as you oil finish/waterproof the bow wood.

Here are a few photos of the re-finished bow. Hope you like!:

Elm Sucker Character Flatbow 40lbs @ 28” (Bow no. 9)

I was given a 3” elm pole by a mate of mine who coppiced a butch of the stuff in one of his hedgerows last year. Many of the poles/logs were around the 3-5” mark so I asked him to save the better stems in his barn so I could pick through them at some point. Many of the stems had been attacked by the beetle and were unusable, which was a real shame because some of the stems would have been perfectly good bow staves had it not been for all the damage below the bark.

In this part of the world we are cursed with Dutch elm disease. It really is quite rare to find an elm stave which doesn’t have any damage at all. I have tried making character elm bows out of badly beetle damaged elm before, but have concluded that the weakness induced by the fungal pathogen will invariably lead to a broken bow at some point in the future.

One or two small spots of black rot tends to be ok though, so the stave which made this bow was given a chance to prove itself, as I really liked the slight wiggle and snake this stave reflected after roughing out. In addition to the tiny bit of beetle damage, I had to negotiate a few other features too, such as knots, drying checks and some propeller twist which came out pretty easily witha little dry heat.

Given the undulating back of this stave I decided to try and mimic the topography of the back on the belly, but in reverse of corse. This created a slightly hollow and varied contour to the bulk of the bows belly. I also opted for a slightly hollow belly in order to maximise the potential for removing some of the beetle damage which was apparent on the belly of the bottom limb.

In order to get the worst of the beetle damage out of the stave I ended up with quite thin limbs, both in terms of width and thickness. As a consequence I ended up with a bow which is a bit on the light side, finishing out at about 42lbs after the initial shooting in phase. Since sanding and finishing the bow, plus a lot more shooting in, she has now settled into about 40# @ 28”. Not too bad for a pretty gnarly elm stick!

I know a lot of trad archery folk hate arrow shelves but I’m not one of them. I like an arrow shelf simple because I can shoot arrows with feathers without having to wrap the fronts of the fletching in order to prevent a quill winding up embedded in my hand.

As much as I like shooting my own primitive arrows with feather fletchings wrapped with sinew, I do find that the raised sinew wrapping can sometimes cause a bit of deflection when it makes contact with the arrow pass or arrow shelf. I often see this deflexion manifest as a false nock left. Or if shooting of a shelf, a false nock high and left.

In addition to an arrow shelf I went to the effort of putting tip overlays on her. If you read my previous post you will have seen that I have recently come across a really nice and very old yew log which has been exposed to the elements in a dead state whilst still being attached to a huge and very old yew tree.

This exposure to the elements has resulted in the sap wood completely rotting off the log leaving pure yew heartwood behind. On closer inspection this heartwood was encapsulated in a 1/8^th inch thick layer of dark, hard and perfectly preserved resin saturated timber. This resinous outer coating is hard like oak. It is impossible to mark it with a finger nail (unlike normal yew heart wood) so I decided to try making tip overlays with it, with a view to making sure that the overlay was situated so that this really hard and wear resistance outer layer would be the surface which the bow string would contact with. My idea worked very well and the overlays look lovely contrasting sharply against the light coloured elm sapwood. I’ll certainly use this petrified yew log to produce other overlays in the future.

The handle wound up being a deeply contoured grip style which would have made it quite difficult to wrap a piece of tanned leather around so I opted for a piece of roe deer raw hide which I made myself recently. (Article to come shortly.) I stained it with some leather stain since it was quite bland looking. It looks all right and almost kinda marbled. And despite it being paper thin, it feels really nice and durable. I expect it will outlive the bow by a mile!

This bow was finished with 8 coats of truoil and has stood up well to a fair bit of shooting. I’ve matched it up to a set of handmade 35# 400 grain bamboo arrows, fletched with turkey wing feathers and tipped with modified empty bullet cases for stump heads. These arrows shoot very well and over the chrono I got an average speed of 142ft/sec.

It never ceases to amaze me how tough bamboo arrows are. Despite being shot dozens of times at all sorts of stuff all three arrows are still going strong!! I intend to do a detailed arrow build at some point so keep an eye out for that article coming at some point this year. I’m also working on a pile of new bows which I hope to show off soon.

Anyways, here are the pics! Hope you like!!

Yew Heartwood Tip Overlays

I’ve often thought about using yew as a material for tip overlays. As attractive as the idea is though, I’ve always been conscious of the idea that yew heartwood is a little bit on the soft side to prevent string wear over time. Well at least on a heavy bow. I’m not convinced that a 50lb bow would suffer from too much trouble in this regard, and expect that the old adage that yew self nocks will cut through is only really applicable to bows with a war bow like weight.

With all that said, up until now I’ve avoided using yew heartwood as tip overlays, just in case they do fail. And also because I’ve never been short of alternative overlay materials such as buffalo horn, bone, antler, bog oak etc. And since these other materials look amazing on just about any bow, I’ve never really had the need to explore using yew. Well up until now that is!

The other day I chanced across the large mature yew pictured bellow. After admiring the size and beauty of this magnificent tree I couldn’t help but notice that it had a short section of very dead and blackened limb protruding from near the base of the tree.

In this photo the dark dead limb can be seen right in the middle of the base of the tree. To give you some scale its about 1 metres long.

This dead branch was so blackened on the outside that it drew me in for further investigation. Upon closer inspection this dead limb had clearly died off many years ago and had seen all of its white wood rot away leaving behind nothing but pure heartwood. I was curious to discover to what extent this black outer coating penetrated down into the underlying heartwood, so I sliced away at a small section with my pocket knife to expose the underlying material.

In the pictures above you can see where I sliced into the branch. The blackening was only surface level but directly below this blackened surface was a really nice, dark layer of heartwood. The first thing I noticed about this underlying dark layer of heart wood was how very hard it was. My pocket knife is pretty sharp but was struggling to make headway as I tried to dig down through this layer.

At this point my interest in this dead branch peaked. Unlike normal soft yew heart wood, this outer layer of rock hard yew heartwood would surely make for a very functional, not to mention beautiful, tip overlay material.

After further investigation of this exposed layer I could see that the reason for this hardening was a common process which many conifers perform when parts of their structure die off. In order to protect its self from pathogen ingress, conifers seal off dead parts by pumping sap bourn resins into the areas which form boundaries between dead and living parts. These resins fill the cells of the trees dying tissues and they eventually set hard like a super glue does once soaked into the pores of wood. The protective outer layer that this process provides protects the living parts of the tree from being colonised by pathogens which might otherwise colonise dead and dying part of the tree in close proximity to living parts.

All the bush crafters out there will have seen this process manifest as the “fatwood” phenomena which leads to the production of resin saturated dead branches on many species of conifer. Bush crafters will remove these “fatwood” branches from dead pine, spruce and fir trees to facilitate fire lighting, as these dead resin saturated branches are highly flammable and aid significantly in fire lighting processes.

I’ve never witnessed resin deposits in yew before however, so this was a learning opportunity for me. The resin deposit I was seeing here in this dead yew limb was nowhere near as extensive as occurs in many other conifer species but was clearly sufficient enough to have created a 3-4mm thick layer of very hard wood. This would be more than enough material to position against the back of a bows limb tip preventing the likelihood of a string cutting through a string grove cut across an overlay made from this particular yew heartwood.

Given that this limb was not affording this magnificent tree any benefit, I decided to “borrow” it for some experimentation. So making sure to leave several inches of dead resin filled wood at the base of the branch to offer protection to the living tree, I cut the dead limb off.

Initially I was a bit concerned with all the splitting which can clearly be seen in the photo above. But after closer inspection I could easily envisage finding plenty of spaces in between the myriad cracks to wrestle out plenty of overlays.

First split exposes some lovely looking wood.

I followed the existing cracks to split out wedges to be worked down further. No difficulty splitting these rounds, especially as they were still quite wet at this point.

Here you can really see the colour difference between the harder, darker, resin saturated portion as it contrasts against the lighter softer parts.

Two rounds split down into workable sized pieces. Enough to last me quite a while!

The wood was initially quite wet so after cleaving the rounds down into more manageable sizes I brought them indoors and sat them on top of the fireplace to dry out thoroughly. Splitting was minimal and they were a joy to work down to a suitable profile.

Below are a couple of photos of my first attempt at making overlays from this log. I think they look pretty cool. The string groves are cut right down through the lighter, softer heartwood up to the darker, harder resin impregnated section. This arrangement means that the colour contract between a white wood bow and the yew overlay is maximised, whilst also ensuring that the string only makes full contact with the hardest part of the overlay.

This top limb overlay was deliberately skewed to follow the contour of the limb tip.

A slightly lighter piece but with more pronounced grain. The bow is Elm.

I’m currently toying with the idea of trying holy as an overlay material since it is pretty hard and a beautiful bright white. I imagine it would contrast sharply against something like a dark stained white wood. (Watch this space!)

If you found this article interesting then keep an eye out in your own local area for some resinous yew so you can give yew heartwood overlays a go. I think there is now a place for yew in my selection of tip overlay materials. What do you think? Please let me know in the comment section below!

Until next time!

Ash HLD Selfbow – Heat Treated 51# @ 27” (Bow No. 8)

Ash is a timber which is super common in my part of the world. As a firewood, Ash is a favourite of mine. As a bow wood though, it is never my first choice. Nor is it my second choice come to think of it!

Ash staves always seem to find their way into my stave collection though. Not surprising really given the abundance of clean and relatively straight logs which abound within my local landscape.

The stave which this bow came from was cut out of a hedgerow by one of my neighbours who was in the process of laying an old derelict hedgerow. The hedgerow in question was full of nice straight and clean 4-6” diameter Ash stems which had coppiced up from the remnants of the parent trees which were laid decades earlier.

I dread to think how many bows I’ve made from Ash. Back in my late teens I would try and make English style D shaped longbows from Ash only to be bitterly disappointed when the bellies chrysaled and the set was measurable in feet not inches! (Joking of course).

So when I pulled this stave out of the rack a few months ago I knew that, without optimising the bow design, a bow made from this stave would only make a “reasonable” bow at best, no matter how clean and straight it was.

So I decided to make yet another Ash bow, but one which would incorporate design features which would enhance efficient and durability whilst also making it a pleasure to shoot. But without any frills! This was going to be a quick and simple primitive bow with only one none essential addition – An arrow rest. Just because I fancied one!

As is the norm around here, this typical Devonian Ash stave showed thin rings and way more early wood than I like to see. But this is just the way most of the Ash in this part of the world grows. Here in the South West, our mild and wet 10 month growing season produces timber which is fast growing through the spring months. This long growing season leads to many of our native hardwood species laying down a considerable proportion of its total seasonal growth ring to early wood.

Ash in general is weak in compression. Our local Ash is even weaker in compression than normal, so if this stave was going to make a bow which would perform and last, then I would have to pull out all the stops to prevent any delaminating in the fades and/or the belly getting crushed. Both of these faults are common place with our local Ash unless extra care is taken.

This bow came from a stave which was 76” long. I cut it down to 68” to ensure that the length was adequate enough to mitigate for the weaker than average compression strength I’d envisaged this stave suffering from. The plan was to end up with a bow measuring 66” nock to nock with limbs 2” wide for the inner thirds tapering down to 3/4″ wide self nocks

In terms of basic appearance I was going for the typical flatbow face profile with limbs lenticular in shape. The cambium had been left on this stave so I worked a camo effect pattern into it. The handle would be deep and contoured simply because I can knock my favourite shape out so quick and easy these days that it takes me no time but adds tremendous comfort to the grip.

Tiller would be circular and the limb tips would be made to do as much work as the rest of the limb in order to maximise the distribution of compression over the greatest possible surface area. Fades would be 3” max in order to get as much limb bending as I could without sacrificing a rigid handle.

The limbs would be slightly hollowed out so as to almost mimic the crown on the back in order to increase the surface area of the belly. Thickness across the width of the limb would increase slightly towards the centre line and thin towards the edges. And the corners on the back would be slightly rounded in order to take some of the tension strong back wood out of commission. This would achieve a better balance between the overpowering tension strength and the compression weak belly wood which this particular Ash stave presented me with.

After basic roughing out, the stave was pretty straight and with a moister content probably around 12%. I wanted some overall reflex in the bow before starting the tillering process so I clamped the stave to a reflex form with about 2” of induced reflex. Clamped in reflex, I then force dried the roughed out stave over my wood burner until the weight would not reduce any further.

After some time to recover ambient moisture levels (6-8%) I tillered the bow to brace height. Most of the force drying reflex had fallen out so before commencing with full tillering, I decided to put the bow back on the same reflex form and thoroughly heat treat it over my wood burner stove top.

My stove was running scolding hot thanks to some lovely dry beech logs. Each limb got about an hour and a half sat over the stove top in order to cook both limb bellies right through to the centre of the limb. The bow’s mass was reduced significantly and given the depth of the cook, there was no way this bow was going to take in much ambient moisture again.

One of the benefits of heavily heat treating white woods is that the cooking process makes the belly side of the bow somewhat hydrophobic. This reduces the woods ability to suck ambient moisture back in. Raw untreated/unsealed Ash loves to suck in atmospheric moisture, which is why it can become a noodle very quickly in damp condition without very good sealing.

After heat treating, I gave the bow a couple of days to rehydrate back to something more like 6-8% moisture content. An untreated, unsealed ash bow will soon suck in enough ambient moister to raise its moister content back up to around 10%. that would be a recipe for set. However a heavily heat treated bow will not slip back to that kind of moisture content without actually wetting it.

After a couple of days to reacclimatise, I then carried on with tillering the bow back to brace again. The cooking of the belly had moved the tiller slightly and added several pounds in draw weight. This is usually what happens so should be expected. In fairly short time she was finished on the tiller tree and looked and felt about 1/8^th positive at 53lb at 27”.

I find that heavily heat treated bows will produce the same arrow speeds as untreated bows of significantly higher draw weights and this bow proved that theory once again. The chronograph demonstrated average arrow speeds of 168fps with a 450 grain arrow. That’s not bad for a simple Ash self bow which was only drawn to 27”!

For a finish I just used a clear polyurethane which I had kicking about. The colour which you can see in the remnants of the cambium are as a result of a couple of days sat in the ammonia fuming pipe before roughing out and force drying began. The tannins in the bark went a nice dark green/brown. The cammo effect looks great.

I didn’t bother with a handle covering on this one. It feels very comfortable even without a covering. For the arrow rest I just used some leather scraps. Nocks were a rendition of the classic Sudbury bow design as depicted in the fantastic book: Encyclopedia of Native American Bows, Arrows & Quivers Volume 1 page 32. My nocks were filed in at 45 degrees though, as opposed to the original 90 degrees as illustrated in the previously mentioned book.

The mass was reduced tremendously by the heat treating process and this bow feels nice and light and manoeuvrable in the hand. After shooting her in, the reflex had dropped a bit. Immediately after unstringing there is about 1” of reflex which settles back to about 1 ½” after resting.

This ended up being a super snappy lightweight bow settling in after 2 weeks of shooting at 51lb at 27”. She is certainly plain and simple but has all the power and functionality that you would want in a primitive hunting bow.

She balances well in the hand whilst being carried and feels well balanced through the draw cycle. She doesn’t stack and is lovely and comfortable to hold back at full draw. The release is nice and quiet without any hand shock due to the low limb mass and comfortable grip. The bow string is the one I made for the previous blog post article I did a few weeks ago discussing using a squirrel tail to make string silencers. You can read that post here: https://southmoorbows.com/squirrel-tail-bow-string-silencers-quick-and-easy-way/

So here she is, hope she inspires you to have a go at heat treating an otherwise simple white wood flatty. Enjoy!

Squirrel Tail Bow String Silencers – Quick and Easy Way!

After a fun few hours chasing after some squirrels with the airgun and the hound the other day, it dawned on me that a squirrel’s tail might just make for a useful and rustic looking bow string silencer.

I’ve made god knows how many string silencers before, usually from rabbit or fox (my personal favourite) fur but have never thought to give squirrel tails a go.

From time to time I will egg tan a pelt just for use as string silencers. A properly egg tanned, softened and smoked rabbit or fox pelt lends itself perfectly to being cut into nice soft thin strips of fur which can be wrapped around a bow string to produce great authentic looking string silencers which function very well.

But the truth is, in terms of performance, you don’t actually need fully tanned and softened pelts to make simple and effective string silencers. You can just wrap a piece of raw pelt around your bow string and let it dry in situ.

In fact, without laying your hands on them, most people would not be able to tell the difference between a properly tanned piece of pelt and a raw fur pelt strip which has simply been wrapped and left to dry thoroughly on your bow string.

So interested primarily in what a squirrel tail silencer would look like, I decided to skin off a squirrel tail, split it down the middle and wrap it in its raw albeit dried state around a bow string to see what it looked/functioned like.

Here is a description of how I went about the experiment and what the end result looked like:

For this project you will need a sharp knife, cut resistant gloves and a squirrel (preferably a dead one like this guy!)

Start by making an incision at the base of the tail. Only cut deep enough to cut through the skin. Try to refrain from cutting through the deeper tail muscles as you will weaken the tail to a point where it could rip it completely off when you come to pull the skin away from the bone in a minute.

Once you have cut through the tail skin all the way around, start to pull the skin down towards the tip of the tail. Try and work around the whole tail so that you can see the underlying muscles all the way around.

Now work the skin back about an inch. Then take your thumb nail and press down against the roll of skin that you have formed so that the force imposed by your thumb is directed down towards the end of the tail. At the same time, start to gently pull your hand which is gripping the skin down and away from the base of the tail.

You should start to feel the skin slip away from the bone and muscle within the tube of skin. Make sure that you pull hard enough to pull the skin away, but don’t pull so hard that you rip the whole tail off the body.

The tail skin should just slip right off the end of the bone/muscle like pulling a sock off.

Now stretch out your skin tube and lay it down on your work surface so that the widest two faces of the fur/skin tube are facing downwards and upwards. You want to cut your skin tube in half by making the first incision along the widest face which is now facing upwards. I do this by inserting the tip of my knife into the opening and making a slit from one end all the way to the tip of the tail.

Push the blade into the opening as far as possible and slit the skin tube right down the middle.

Take your time to make sure that you are keeping to the centre line so that your strips end up equal in width.

Once you have split the skin tube right down the middle you can lay the skin out flat and straight ready for the next cut.

Now find the centre of your skin and with a rolling, slicing and pressing motion, cut straight down the middle of your tail skin.

You should be left with two strips of raw tail skin with hair still attached. Trim off the base end a bit to remove the widest piece of skin and the adjoining short hair. This section with short hair is of no use to us.

Give the two strips a good wash with soap and water to clean them up a bit.

Now rinse them off and hang them out to dry somewhere that will stay dry and warm. I hung my two strips above my wood burner and they were completely dry after just one night. The next day I gave the dried skin strips a bit of gentle manipulation with just my fingers in order to soften the stiff, dry skin a little.

I then fitted them to a new bow string the same way I would fit any pelt strip string silencer. After securing one end of the skin strip to the slack bow string by parting the string and threading the end through the gap.

I then re-apply tension to the bow string and begin to wrap the rest of the skin strip around the bow string in the same direction as the bow string has been twisted up.

Once I’m only left with 3/8 inch or so of the skin strip, I will take the tension out of the string again and part the string so that I can pass the tag end of the skin strip through the gap I’ve created, securing it in place once the string tension is re-applied.

At this point I will typically push the two end of the skin strip towards each other with hand pressure. This causes the skin strip to bunch up nicely which in turn helps to flair out the hair more evenly.

If need be, the last thing to do now that the string is taught again is to trim off any tag ends of the skin with a pair of scissors.

I think they look pretty cool and they seem to hold up to the wear and tear as well as any other pelt strip silencers. The only criticism I have is that they do look a little dishevelled the moment they receive a soaking. But then don’t most fur silencers!?

Give then a try and see what you think.

Yew HLD Recurve Character Branch Bow. 48# @ 27″ (Bow No. 7)

This bow started out life as a 2-3” branch which I harvested a couple of years ago. Given all the knots, kinks and wiggles, I knew it was going to be a challenge to turn this ugly little stick into a bow. Yew is one of those few bow woods which can be incredibly forgiving however, so I decided to give it a go!

The main challenge with this branch was going to be placing a bow back somewhere on it, and in a way which would keep the back from including any of the larger more fragile knots. One particular face was cleaner than the rest, but by choosing to use this face as the bows back, I would have to deal with a significantly deflexed 8” section which would have to fall somewhere between one of the limbs fades and the middle of that limb.

The branch measured only 68” long so I would have little opportunity to manipulate the handle location anywhere other than in the approximate centre. Given all the potential weak points on this branch, I did not dare to aim for a bow any shorter than 66” nock to nock.

I knew that I’d be able to steam out some of the unsightly deflex in what ended up being the top limb, but given all the knotty material in this deflexed section, I dared not try to straighten it out completely as the likely hood of one on the knots popping was very high.

After roughing out the basic limb thickness and face profile, I set about reducing the deflexed section with steam. After that was taken care of the small amount of string misalignment plus a little twist was corrected with some dry heat. At this point I also steamed in the gentle recurves. Now I had a more workable and predictable shape, I could then start to think about the final limb width and general profile/cross section.

The heartwood content of this bow was not great and the sapwood was about 8-10mm thick. The back was covered in small raised pins so chasing a ring was totally out of the question. And since the likely-hood of this branch ending up as firewood was high, there was no way I would consider investing time and effort to sinew back a risky bow like this, just to get away with violating the back in order to improve the ratio of sapwood to heart wood.

As with all branches, the pithy centre was biased towards the side which had the tighter growth rings (1-2mm) which happened to be on the same side of the branch which I’d chosen as the back. This meant that the pith was currently contained within both limbs and ran right through the handle.

Whilst I have no problem with the pith running through the handle section or even the thicker parts of the fades, I do not like leaving the pith in the working parts of the limbs. Experience has taught me to expect cracking, splitting and even fretting to occur when the pith runs close to the surface of the belly material.

Given that the crown on this branch was significant and the pith was currently buried inside the roughed out limbs I opted to hollow out both limbs to match the crown, whilst hopefully getting deep enough to remove the pith at the same time.

This worked fine but left me with very little heart wood. In fact the sapwood to heartwood ration was around 70/30%. Not ideal so I decided to take the sides in as the sides were entirely sapwood. This reduced the limb width down from about 1” 7/8ths to around 1” 5/8ths.

Now that the pith was out of the limbs and the heartwood sapwood ration had been improved, I didn’t have a great deal of bow left to play with, so I had to be realistic with the outlook. I guessed she would probably make for a finished bow around 35 40lbs at best. So I was really suprised when I actually managed 51lb at 27”!

I tillered the bow to 27” as my brother will likely get this bow. His draw length on a good day is about 27”. I took the tillered (albeit unsealed) bow stump shooting for a couple of weeks with only tillering nocks cut in and a leather strip wrapped around the handle to double as a grip and arrow pass. After a hundred plus arrows I checked her over for faults but found none.

I was expecting some of the steam correction to pull out in the deflex section but it didn’t. The finished bow looks like it has a very positive tiller but it is deceptive. The deflex section right out of the top fade is what gives this bow the look of excessive positive tiller.

In reality, this bow feels very well balance through the entire draw cycle and the limbs time together great when I shoot it with split fingers. I’ve shot enough bows over the year to be able to feel when a limb is weaker than the other. Despite the appearance, this bow is very well balanced.

After double checking the bows tiller by feel and then by tiller tree, I confirmed that the top limb is only slightly weaker than the bottom limb which is perfect for both my use, and my brothers use, since we both shoot split fingers.

It never ceases to amaze me how you can take a bow which looks to be tillered very well, only to draw it back and feel that torque on the wrist that you get when one limb is significantly stronger than the other. Nowadays, when it comes to final tiller, I place more emphasis on feel than I do on appearances. Where wooden bows are concerned (especially character bow) appearances are incredibly deceiving!

After shooting and sanding, I weighed her again and she was settled in at 48lbs at 27”. Happy with that I fitted her static recurved tips with a pair of Red Deer antler tip overlays, and I inlayed the arrow pass with a patch of buffalo horn. For the handle I chose a simple leather grip fitted after sealing the finished bow with 8 coats of Tru-Oil.

This bow put a smile on my face. I could well have imagined this bow breaking mid tiller. Not only was I impressed that she held together, but she actually ended up a being a proper little looker too. So much character and more than satisfactory performance has made this little bow one of my favourite character bows so far this year. (I have others to show off soon!)

In terms of performance, with a 12 strand B50 string on she sent a bunch of 450 grain arrows over the chronograph at an average speed of 143ft/sec. Not bad for a knarly old branch bow! Mass is 560 grams and she carries about ¾” of set immediately after unstringing which returns back to almost straight after resting.

Here she is. Enjoy!

About 3/4″ of set immediately after unstringing. Returns to almost straight after resting.

Thanks for looking!

Sinew Backed Yew Recurve Flatbow 55# @ 28″ Bow No.6

This is one of the many “lockdown bows” which I made through 2020/21. Having been furloughed for a couple of months I took the opportunity to tinker with a pile of difficult staves which I’d had kicking about for years. A good time to try and sort the potential staves from the firewood!

This bow came from one such stave. It was nothing more than a branch to be honest but was still one of the better potential staves in terms of its overall shape. That said, It was still flawed to some extent with masses of pin knots on what would be the back side of the stave. It also had quite a lot of deflex across the entire length of the back. Especially in what would be the bottom limb.

Despite the imperfections I committed to making a bow from this stave and had long since promised to build a mate of mine a yew recurve. So I made it my mission to honour my promise using this far from optimal Yew branch. The basic plan was to build a 66″ nock to nock” 50-55lb recurve flatbow.

The stave had nice tight growth rings of between 1-2mm thickness but unfortunately carried little heartwood. The sapwood on what would be the back was too thick at around 12mm thick, but due to all the tiny raised pin knots, it would be impossible to properly chase a ring down to a better sapwood thickness without violating the back around all the tiny raised knots.

A trick which I have used many times before in this situation is simply to accept the violation of rings on the back but mitigate against limb failure by sinew backing. So that’s what I decided to do with this bow.

The stave was only 3″ wide so the crown was moderate. Rather than try and reduce the sapwood thickness in a rounded fashion as would be necessary to mimic the natural crown, I decided to just flatten the whole back with a rasp. In doing this I was able to work down to approximately one sapwood growth ring right down the centre line of the bows back and follow that from one end to the other maintaining a totally flat back profile.

Now that I had nearly 50% of the limb represented by heart wood, I roughed out the general limb thicknesses and finalised the face profile. In order to counter the significant deflex I recurved the tips with steam and performed a small amount of dry heat correction to line up the tips and correct some small string alignment issues. Then it was on with 3oz of deer leg sinew, glued on with my own home made sinew glue.

After the backing was completed I wrapped the whole thing up for a few days in cloth strips to keep the sinew from peeling away from inside the recurves and around the handle.

Once I could see that the sinew was dry I unpeeled the wrapping so I could take a peek. To my disappointment some of the sinew had dried out to form some small fissures. I put this down to one reason. Taking way too long to apply the sinew!

I’d timed the sinew application with the kids getting home which invariably led to a pile of requests, Dad jobs and other frivolous distractions all when I’m trying to slap on my glue soaked sinew bundles. Lesson learnt!!

Anyone who has done any amount of sinew backing will tell you that the best sinew jobs are done quickly and smoothly whilst the glue is still warm and not allowed to set up in between bundle applications. Each fresh bundle of sinew wants to be laid down alongside its neighbour before the neighbouring bundle has started to “Gel”. That’s where I’d gone wrong.

All the distractions had led to me applying bundles as and when I got chance as opposed to in one fast fluid operation. This meant that by the time my next sinew bundle got applied it’s neighbour has gelled up reducing the ability of the fresh sinew bundle sticking to it’s neighbouring bundle.

The result is bundles of sinew separating apart from one another when the bundles start to shrink during the drying process. I should add however that the adhesion between the glue soaked sinew and the bow’s back is not affected by this phenomena.

As disappointing as the end result was, the imperfections that I was seeing in the dried backing were only aesthetic. The functionality of the bow’s backing was completely unaffected.

So onwards we went. After the cloth wrappings had been removed and re-tightened several times over the initial drying period (a week), the wrappings came off and the stave was set aside for nearly a year to cure thoroughly.

I’d kept the limbs asymmetric to try and mitigate for the lower limb deflex which was now substantially less than it was. This was due to the sinew backing pulling the stave back about 1 & 1/2″. Now the deflex was only about 3/4″ in total which was a massive improvement as before backing the natural deflex was about 2 “. After coming out of hibernation, deer antler tip overlays were fitted over the top of the sinew and the tillering began.

In order to preserve as much heart wood on the belly as possible I opted to create a slightly rounded albeit mainly flat belly. An arrow shelf was added in the form of a scrap piece of deer antler.

The bow was quick and easy to tiller and looked nice pulled down to 28″. At this point the weight was 58lb which was about right for the guy who would be getting this bow.

Before finishing the bow I shot stumps with it for a couple of weeks then re adjusted the tiller slightly to weaken the top limb just a tad bit more then called her done at 55lb at 28″ with a neutral tiller. (The owner of this bow shoots three under.) To finish I coated the sinew with a good covering of Titebond III so seal and smooth out the sinew. After sanding it was on with 8 coats of Truoil to finish.

The handle was covered with a piece of scrap leather and the same leather in reverse was used to protect the arrow pass.

I really like this bow. It’s a bit heavy in the hand (630Grams) due to the extra weight from the sinew but isn’t really noticeable once you get in the swing of shooting her. The limbs are an even tapper from 1″ 3/8ths at the fades down to 1/2″ at the tips.

This bow made for a snappy shooter which I really enjoyed shooting. I shot her over the chrono to see if she was quicker than usual and, whilst hardly getting blown away by the speed, I was quite happy with the 162ft/sec average that I got with a 500 grain arrow. That’s not bad for a stick and string bow!

Anyway, I hope you like the pics!

Elder Character Longbow Hollow Limb Design. 40# 28″ Bow No.5

This bow started out life as a very simple 60lb flatbow which was made from a stave which had been given to me by my neighbour who was grubbing out a patch of wasteland on his farm. Whilst the log was fairly straight (for Elder) the twist was the best part of 80 degrees!

I almost binned the log but thought that I’d use it to test how well a roughed out green Elder stave could be trained to conform to a better shape by using a form and clamps throughout the initial air drying phase.

After a few weeks on the drying form the clamps were removed to reveal a nice straight and twist free stave which I moved indoors to hang above the wood burner to speed dry for another couple of weeks.

A one inch long drying check behind one of the larger knot clusters was the only fault which I was a bit surprise by since Elder can check quite badly when force dried too hard.

Elder is strong in compression so I felt safe in keeping the limb width down to around 1″ 3/8ths. I’d never do this for a wood like Ash or Hazel but Elder is a fantastically springy wood which can cope with way more of a narrow limb profile so long as the length is not compromised too much.

I kept the length long at 66″ nock to nock and opted for a straight rigid handle and simple self nocks. I tillered the bow to 60lbs at 28″ and shot this bow like that for about a year. She performed well and was a powerful fast and efficient bow but 60lbs was too heavy for my likings so back in the late autumn of last year I decided to either get rid of this bow or drop the weight.

At around the same time my brother’s eldest son was asking if I could make him a bow. Whilst happy to oblige, (great excuse to make another bow) the reality was that I was short of time so instead of making him a bow from scratch I opted to re-tiller this Elder bow for him.

Long story short, I dropped the weight down to a more comfortable draw weight for my nephew at his draw length which is 26″. And instead of just removing wood from the previously flat belly I decided to hollow out the limbs to match the crown on the back by using the curved scrapper to re-tiller.

The bow had taken about an inch of set whilst in its previous 60lb straight limbed flat bellied form, so after reducing the weight I decided to see if I could reduce that set a little by heat treating the belly whilst fixed to a slightly reflexed form.

But before heat treating the limbs I also decided to lightly flick the tips to try and reduce the stack which it had suffered a little from previously. The recurved tips where steamed in, then once they had settled, I heated the recurves a bit more thoroughly with the stove top in order to ensure that they would never pull out.

After heat treating the flicked tips and the hollowed out limbs I finished the re-tillering and quit at 42lb at 26″ with a 1/8″ inch positive tiller. Shooting in and re-sanding shaved off another couple of pounds so I finally ended up at 40lbs at 26″.

The previous finish on this bow had been urethane varnish which I was keen to strip of so I could stain the revamped bow a darker colour. After stripping I hit the bare wood with a dark Jacobean oil based stain then sealed her up with 8 coats of Truoil.

A simple leather handle cover and piece of leather as the arrow pass finished the job. The bow is now a light in the hand (460grams) snappy and pointable bow and my nephew was delighted the the end result. I’ve paired this bow up with some 35-40 spine arrows and she is sending a 400 grain arrow over the chronograph at an average of 141ft sec which isn’t anything special but sure is fun to point at stumps!

Here are the pics. Hope you like!

1/2″ of set immediately after unstringing. Returns to 1/8th inch after resting.

Bow No.4 – Sinew Backed Character Yew Flatbow 50lb at 28″

I built this bow about this time last year after coming across a knarley 2 1/2″ thick yew branch which had been kicking around in my yew stash for a few years. It was one of those branch wood staves which no conventional bowyer would have used for anything other than firewood. And I must admit, I nearly added it to my own firewood stack!

The branch was relatively straight across the cleanest face but had several bumps, knots and wiggles distributed between 8 sections of reflex and 7 sections of opposing deflex. The sap wood to heartwood ratio was about 2-1 with sapwood clearly forming the majority of the branches volume.

I decided to give it a chop about with the axe to see what the belly would look like with most of the waste wood chopped away. To be honest, it looked like it might just about make a bow.

My main concern was that the pith centre looked like it might not come out without reducing the thickness to a point where the bow would end up very light. But after long string tillering it looked like the limb thickness would be clear of the pith whilst leaving behind enough wood to make a light to moderate weight bow. But the pith would run through the handle along with a drying check which looked unsightly.

My original plan was to produce a stiff handled flat bow with a high crowned D section cross section. But I just couldn’t put up with leaving that horrible crack running right along the length of the handle and fades. So I decided to gouge all that split wood out from the handle and the fades leaving me with just enough wood to function as a handle albeit a bendy character handle!

I made the limbs symmetrical and a max width of 1″ 5/8ths. Tiller was 1/4″ positive. Fades about 2″. Antler tip overlays were fitted after sinew backing so that the overlays could sit on top of the sinew. Nock to nock the finished bow measures 64″.

The single layer of deer leg sinew backing was a hedge against the knots but in hind sight was completely unnecessary. That said the sinew has kept the set to absolute zero. In fact before I sinew backed the bow I tillered it as a self bow to 28″ and was content with the 44lbs draw weight and the 1″ of permanent set after shooting in over a hundred arrows.

But I had a small pile of sinew to do something with so decided to stick it on the back of this bow to see what effect it would have on such an undulating and knarly high crowned back. The results were better than expected!

After sticking 2oz of sinew on with sinew glue the bow was wrapped up and shelved until Nov 2022 so it had about 10 months of curing time. During this time the bow had straightened out and the permanent set had disappeared and didn’t reappear even after retillering and significant shooting in. The weight had jumped up too so I ended up with 50lbs at 28″ with no set at all.

With no skins to cover up the sinew I decided to just leave it bare. I gave the whole back a coat of Titebond III to help smooth down the rough sinew before finishing the whole bow with Trueoil. I refrained from wrapping the handle so that the gouged out handle could feature as part of the overall character of the bow.

An attractive knot is in just the right spot to function as an arrow pass so I didn’t bother with an inlay. The final look is certainly rustic but to be honest, I quite like it!

The handle contours naturally in such a way that the crook acts as a locator dish which feels quite comfortable in the hand, even with the handle bending upon drawing. That said, unless I hold this bow lightly I do notice a bit of hand shock. I think that this is down to the mass of the tips which is probably not helped by the presence of the sinew. In fact, this bow is a little bit on the heavy side thanks to the backing. The total weight of this bow is 760grams! Yikes!

I actually like shooting this bow and it gets quite a bit of attention from others who often see it and comment with questions like “What the heck is that!?” Once they’ve shot it though they usually ask if I can make one for them!

Anyway, here are the pics. Hope you like!