Selfbow Building Basics - bow handle and riser 

When building a selfbow from a natural bow stave split from a tree you’ll inevitably be dealing with the characteristics inherent in that stave. Figuring out how to bring a longbow or recurve to life from natural materials is one of the fascinating aspects of bow and arrow building.
One common bow building problems is working with a stave that might not be large enough or deep enough to build the kind of bow handle or riser that we want. These thin staves are an inevitable result of harvesting your own bow wood. Rather than dismissing them as only good for kids bows, or perhaps a bendy handle D bow design, let’s take a look at how to build up the riser section so we’ll have enough wood to work with.
In this video Clay Hayes shows how to build up the bow stave riser section by laminating another block of wood onto the stave. Clay uses a belt sander to flatten both the stave and extra wood, making sure that both surfaces are perfectly flat to ensure a thin glue line. If you don’t have a belt sander you could glue some 50 grit sandpaper to a board and use that to flatten the pieces.
To make it easier to flatten the riser section, some of the wood should be removed from the belly side of the limbs so the riser is above them. This will make more sense in the video. That way only the riser comes in contact with the sander which makes it easier to flatten. This method also works great for building up the riser for a stiff handle on a board bow.
Clay uses titebond 3 wood glue to glue up the riser on this bow. This is a very tough and water resistant wood glue.
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