Adventures in Bow Making – Day 1

Hello Everyone!

This week I am taking a bow making class at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, an awesome school for woodworking located in Rockport, Maine. Yesterday was the first day of class.

After a lecture on the safe handling of equipment and not smoking near the hazardous materials, we began by splitting a log into staves for making bows. First the instructor created a cut with an ax and then we took turns using hammer and wedges to split the log in half and then to split the halves into three. We’re working with Osage Orange, which is in fact neon yellow in color, of a similar shade to turmeric.

Once we had our staves we used a draw knife – a tool which may well have supplanted round-nosed pliers as my favorite tool – to removed the pith of the tree as well as the bark and the pale ring of sapwood between the bark and the heartwood. This produced a sea of yellow shavings.

A Sea of Yellow Shavings
A Sea of Yellow Shavings

Once the bark and  sapwood were removed we began the careful process of bringing the wood down to a single growth ring. As you no doubt know, each year a tree grows it adds a ring – actually it adds two: a lighter colored, thinner ring in the spring and a darker colored, thicker ring in the summer. We wanted the front surface of our staves to consist only of a single unviolated summer growth ring, no doubt so that once the bow is drawn there is less likelihood of cracks and breakage.

The staves we cut were all of green wood, which while ideal for cutting staves is not ideal for the actual shaping of the bow, because wood dries out as it ages and that aging process coupled with the stress of living life as a functional bow would cause cracks or breakage. So, we were then issued aged staves and began to design our bows and to roughly shape them using a draw knife.

Design Drawn on Bow Stave
Design Drawn on Bow Stave

And so concludes the first day of my adventures in bow making.

Thank you for reading.

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