Selfbow woods New Zealand

[stickbow]

Gidday, I was wondering what native woods in NZ you could use to make a self bow? I make them out of ash and yew but have run out of staves! I hear you can make them out of eucalyptus, I think. But im not sure on that one. Any help on woods in NZ or australia would be great! Thanks, John

[Stickbow Hunter]

Have a look at this thread: http://www.ozbow.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=3329

Jeff

[stickshooter]

Kanuka or Manuka,
I made 1 out of manuka that worked quite well.

[Hamish]

I don't know much about NZ woods, but eucalypts are a problem. Some guys in Aus rave about them, maybe some are good. I have tried similar species from my area and despite,having a high specific gravity, high modulus of rupture etc, I found most eucaypts to be brittle in tension and compression. The needed to be much longer and or wider, than any Bowyers Bible recomendations,even then they were temperamental with fretting compared to common intoduced species like oak, ash, elm etc.
I have made successful bows from Tasmanian Myrtle beech, which is very similar to NZ Beech. It might be worth trying, especially with a tree stave. Another NZ guy made some stunning bows from Privet.
Hamish.

[Brumbies Country]

I think what Hamish said about wattles is largely true however a couple of guys here in NSW have had really good experiences with Currawang (Acacia doratoxylon) and hickory wattle (Acacia falciformis). Both guys (Pete Rogers re the first and John Deer re the second) are knowledgable craftsmen. I've seen both woods in action and have been impressed.

[Brumbies Country]

Humble aplogies. I just realised that Hamish was talking about eucalypts, not wattles. My comment re those two wattles still stands however

[Jutte]

Just my two cents re NZ woods.
I'm not really a bowyer just an enthusiastic maker of wooden splinters.
Made a self bow for my nephew out of manuka years ago - went really well.
Also seen a great flight bow made out of laminated limbs of manuka tomato stakes of all things.
Have heard that some guy made a long bow out of tawa.
You can find the properties of the wood - the real problem is actually finding the woods themselves
due to the milling of native timbers slowing down etc.
Everyone told me that rimu would never cut it as a rifle stock but I made one anyway.
Been beating the heck out of that stock for more than twenty years and it's still good.
So I suppose just find some sort of wood and give it a go.

[Dennis La Varenne]

Stickbow and everybody,

I have a standard bit of advice I give to everybody wanting to use an unknown wood species and that is to split a piece and see if there are long fibrous splinters connecting the splits which have to be chopped apart.

These long fibres are the natural wood fibres and are a very good indicator of a usually sound bow wood.

My other observation is that woods which split cleanly tend NOT to be very strong in compression and fret (form transverse cracks) on the belly which lead to a broken bow.

With that split piece of wood (stave), just follow all the other usual preparatory stages of roughing out an oversized bow from the split, sealing it and leaving it to dry until it reaches its lowest stable mass. Weigh it every other day on a scale which can show grammes.

After that, with that piece of dry stable wood, make your bow.

A rule of thumb is that the denser the wood, the heavier and smaller the bow that can be made from it because of the usually greater strength inherent to a denser wood specie.

If the wood is relatively low mass and you want a heavy bow of greater than 45-50lbs, make it longer and/or wider to reduce the bending load on the wood.

There are some basic maths by which you can work out the dry density of the bit of wood which you have using water displacement, but the denser woods begin up around the 750kg/m^3 and higher while lighter woods go down to around 500kg/m^3 but not lower for adult bows from 30 - 50lbs on average.

Skilled bowyers can get sound bows from some surprisingly weak woods, but that comes from experience. At the beginning stick with some basic guidelines.