My name is Weylin Olive, and my passion is making and shooting wooden selfbows. Archery has been taken over by modern technology and big business, but to me there is little that is more joyful than teaching a piece of wood to bend gracefully and send an arrow into flight. If you share this passion or would like to learn more about bowmaking and archery then I hope you enjoy what I have to share here.
Want to say thank you Waylen for this advice . Have a self bow and I could not get the limbs aligned no matter what I did. I did this method and it worked perfectly for what I wanted .
Weylin, I plan to put rawhide on the bow I’m working on now because it developed drying cracks on the back. I’ve got the bow to the floor tiller stage, should I put the rawhide on now to prevent maybe a splinter from popping around one of the drying cracks or tiller and hope for no issues then put the rawhide on? I have filled the cracks, they’re not severe but for peace of mind I ran thin super glue in them. Thanks for any response and help
I apologize if this has been answered already but, you give the dimensions for everything except the thickness of the handle. You were just eyeballing it when you drew it out, but I know this has everything to do with the strength of the riser/handle. It looks like somewhere between 1 1/2" and 1 3/4". ? Would 1 1/2" be enough? Thanks for this excellent tutorial!!
This is so helpful. Thanks alot. So a stave bow bends with the grains stacked upon each other whereas in board bow the grains will bend beside each other?
Any info on a card scraper holder? Saw one in another video. I use a couple German steel card scrapers that I picked up at an antique shop and rely on them exclusively once I have good tiller established early in the process.
So do those dimensions for the fades apply on, say, a smaller sized bow as well? I'm trying to build a bow for my 5 year old's birthday. Her draw length is like 15", so she'd need a 34" bow. I've got a 46" bow kind of laid out on a board bc I want some room for her to grow into it. That being said, a 2" long fade at 2" wide is gonna eat up a considerable length of the bow I have for her. I think. maybe.?
Where are you that has a 65# minimum hunting weight?! I can always make a custom bow. I don't typically make bows for sale that are that heavy as most people don't like to draw that much these days.
Fantastic series!! Learned a ton and will be referencing this many times going forward. Appreciate you taking the time and paying it forward. Building a community of mentorship and knowledge transfer is so important today. Well done! 👊
