Making a bow

For a couple of years now, I have wanted to make my own bow. It just seems like something I want to know how to do. Enzo (one of my archery buddies) said that he would teach me, but that we needed to find a piece of wood. The wood has to be dried and straightened, so it isn't always easy to find a piece. However, Mauro (another archer buddy) had a piece of wood that I could use that should be long enough. In case you're interested, the wood is a piece of cornelian cherry.

We started off by finding all of the "halves": halfway down the length, halfway across the height, halfway across the width. Which directions are height and width is determined by finding the straightest path down the branch. After that, we went on remove the bark that was getting in our way. Then we drew the general curve of the bow onto the wood.We tried to whack away the wood we didn't need with a hatchet, but unfortunately the piece of wood that we have is a bit "contorto" (contorted)-its grain twists in a funny way and it has a lot of knots in it. This makes it very hard and risky to do much with the hatchet. It is hard because the knots are hard to hack through and risky because the branch has a tendency to try to split in a bit of a twist, which would completely ruin the bow. We had similar issues with the two handed blade that we tried to use next. The only thing that can be done is filing. Lots and lots of filing. We filed down the back of the bow (the part facing you when you draw back), not very precisely, but as a start. By the time I had done the upper part and most of the lower part, we had been working for two hours and it was getting close to lunch time.

I went home for lunch, and then I came back after the pausa to work on it a bit more. When we got back to work, we decided to work on the "flettenti": the limbs of the bow. Basically, some more filing to thin out the branch in the other direction. After another two hours of filing, I had finished the "rough draft" of one half of the bow (for no reason at all, I think of it as the top half of the bow).

Drawing the lines (I actually drew them, Enzo is making them darker)

Enzo working with the hatchet- the bow was trying to split, so I couldn't do that part

Filing 

The result of the first two hours' work 

This will be where I hold the bow

Me working on the "flettenti"

Marking for the "flettenti"

I will be going back tomorrow to work on the bow some more.

Ciao,

Florence

P.S. Enzo also gave me a bone replica of a Native American arrow head, which is pretty cool.