Suitable timber for making bows

[sambahunta]

Hi guys,
as suggested by Erron I am posting this here from Hunting net.

I have recently bought a book on Native American bow making and now I am keen on making my own.
Does any one have any ideas on the best wood available in Australia for this. I would really like to use Osage Orange, but if there is a local substitute I would like to hear about it.

[erron]

sambahunta,

Welcome!

wouldn't you know it, just as you join, one of the main sources for this kind of info. here, Glenn Newell, has gone for a 2 week hunt. Glenn's a bowyer in QLD, and his site is listed on our Links page. The other bowyers there would also be worth an email, I'm sure. Some have classes in bow-making, and extensive experience with OZ woods. Someone else I'm trying to get to join is Dennis La Varenne, a Victorian here in Melbourne, who is also a great selfbow maker.

Keep checking back, I'm sure at least some of these guys, and some others hopefully, will chime in with their experience

Thanks for registering, and good to have you on board,

Erron

[Stickbow Hunter]

G'day sambahunta,

Welcome to the site. You being one of those Gringo trad bowhunters like Erron you should know that Osage Orange grows in many places in NSW and Vic. Ask around and you might be able to find some. I have seen it growing on the side of the road down there. It sure makes a nice bow. I'm no expert when it comes to making slefbows but I have made a couple with Osage and they shoot great. Even taken a few critters with them.

If you can't locate any locally try John Clark from Ausbow Industries as he did have staves for sale at one stage. He may have had other wood types as well.

Other woods that we have found to work well is Red Ash. It is a great bow wood because you can make an English design bow with it no worries. Black Wattle is another that can be used.

I think Glenn may have a section on his site with a list of suitable Aussie bow woods.

Hope this may help some and you get to make a bow for yourself. Jeff

[sambahunta]

Thanks for that Jeff. I might just have to have a drive around the neighborhood and see whats growing in peoples gardens.

[erron]

Sambahunta,

another site you could try is The Bowhunters Group of Australia:

http://www.thebowhuntersgroupofaustralia.com/

An excellent site for all-round bowhunting in OZ. They are mostly into non-trad, but there are a lot of members and I'm sure they'll try to help.


cheers,

Erron

[Mark]

Sambahunta, I've only ever made 2 selfbows, one from soapwood (Red Ash) and the other from Aussie Ossage.
Have to say that I enjoyed working with the Ossage much more. It was a snaky piece of timber but it came out the poundage I was after and made a good quick bow. Took it to the hills and got lucky with it as well.

Got a real kick out of carving that bow from a log.

Mark K.

[Dennis La Varenne]

Sambahunta,

Erron has asked me to reply to your query.

I have made a few different styled selfbows from number of woods, both Osage Orange (Maclura pomifera), Qld Red Ash (Alphitonia excelsa) and a some others.

I suggest that you choose ANY Australian hardwood which, when split, leaves long strings and splinters, and you have to chop the strings apart to separate the splits. This sounds vague, but a 'stringy' wood is one with long fibres which is what you want. Red gum for instance is useless because when split, it makes chips because of the very short fibres, even though it is a very dense hardwood.

If you are intending to make a short Plains bow for hunting (I have made several) you will find them very difficult to shoot with any real accuracy without considerable practice. They were magnificent for use from horseback at extremely short range. If you intend to replicate a long Cherokee style bow, it is more like a rectangular section longbow and much easier to shoot accurately and more stable.

There is nothing magical about Osage Orange (sometimes called Mock Orange here). It is hard and durable and able to take knocks well. You should be able to find it in most of the Goldfield areas of Victoria where it was planted mostly by American goldminers in the 19th century as a toolhandle wood and by some graziers along fencelines as a deterrent to stock because it has thorns on its smaller branches and the large lower branches tend to grow out parallel to the ground making it difficult for cattle to get through the tangle of branches and push down fences.

The heartwood is coloured from dark orange to almost fluoro yellow. It can look like bright yellow plastic. The sapwood is white and always has 7 growth rings and converts abruptly to heartwood. Most remove the sapwood, but I have made a couple of English longbows and left it on and they shot well and did not break if you know the secret of preventing it from rotting.

If you see any leafless trees in Winter which have almost no trunk, seem to be covered in a yellowy-green moss, are pretty spread-out rather than tall, and not very high compared to their width, have alook at them close up. The bark is very coarse and ropey, and you will find lime-coloured grapefruit sized fruits lying on the ground under the tree. They are NOT edible. The leaf is somewhat similar to the leaf of an Elm tree - broad lanceolate with serrated edges, quite large on the young branches and smaller (??? 7-8cm long) on the older branches.

I will stick my neck out and say that any reasonable hard wood will make a good bow if you choose a design which suits the strengths and weaknesses of the individual wood specie.

The very best all round design which is easy to make, durable and with good cast is the flatbow such as the Holmegaard style of Neolithic Europe. It was a remarkably efficient design and a showed an astonishing understanding of the best mass distribution of wood for best performance.

Anyway, the Plains Indian design is an efficient use of limited wood quality for short range shooting from horseback where the range was often only a few metres both in warfare and hunting bison. The Plains bow is an extremely easy design to make and very unsophisticated, but practical for its intended use. Most plains bows were NOT made from Osage. The most common wood used was the northern US Ash.

Osage Orange was a tree native to Oklahoma and thereabouts. The French colonists in early America referred to it as Bois D'Arc (wood of the bow). The principal tribes which used it before the Cherokee were forcibly marched to Oklahoma from their ancestral tribal areas, were the Comanche and Kiowas. The Cheyennes also obtained it through trade with the more southern tribes. The Cherokees began using it to make their longbows when they were removed to the Indian Territories west of the Mississippi in the 1830s I think it was.

Because they were an Eastern tribe, they were not horse Indians and needed therefore to shoot game from further away because they hunted on foot. A longbow is much better for this because it can be drawn longer using a heavier arrow which has much better hitting power at longer range.

A short bow can only be drawn short because it is in real danger of breaking if drawn long. Therefore there is a short powerstroke which at draw weights which the average human can handle cannot propel a heavy arrow at reasonable speed at any real hunting distance. That is no handicap if you are shooting a bison from a couple of metres from horseback.

Enough history!

Try to obtain a log of at least 100mm diameter of any hardwood (??red stringybark is pretty common). Debark it and heavily spray the exposed wood with a household tabletop disinfectant spray then split it into four when the disinfectant is dry. I will send you some instructions by email about this if you wish. You can then rough out the shape (being very generous) and put the staves away where it is dry, out of the direct sun and which has good ventilation where breeze can blow over it and such out the moisture (airdrying). It will take only a few weeks for the staves to dry well. Tap them with your knuckle and listen for a kind of ringing sound. In really dry wood it has a kind of dull metallic ring, orkyou can weigh it on a light scale and keep checking till it loses as much weight as it can, in which case it is as dry as it can get in your local climate.

You can force it a bit more by putting it in your car on a warm day with the windows down for a few days more.

I have tried ordinary Tasmanian Oak from a hardware shop (Bunnings) but you MUST be able to read the grain direction properly in selecting the board. It is a light hardwood which does not take compression well on the belly, so you must be generous in the width and fairly thin (flatbow). By the way, 10mm Tassie Oak dowels make good arrows of reasonable weight and spine.

Other than the above, there are not direct substitutes for Osage here. Glen Newell (I think it was) once wrote that Queensland Spotted Gum had the same mechanical properties as Osage. I have used a little bit of it but found that it did not tolerate compression in a bow nearly as well as Osage. But that could have been the quality of the wood I was given also.

Anyway, that will do for the time being.

[erron]

Dennis,

thanks for the info mate! A great post, full of pertinent detail and it's sure piqued my interest in the history of the flatbow. I'm sure it will go some way at least to answering Sambahunter's query.

I should point out that Dennis has just finished a stint of several gruelling years fighting on behalf of hunters generally in his positions, specifically as Secretary of the Shooting Sports Council of Victoria. He was looking forward to a rest, apparently, but nevertheless found the time to answer the call from a pestering 'friend'

Thanks Dennis, for your past efforts, and in anticipation of your continued presence here (when you're ready, this time, promise )

Cheers,

Erron

[sambahunta]

Wow, thanks you guys!
Special thanks to Dennis and Errol, I am all fired up to go and find some timber. I am going to drag my two boys out into the bush to find some right now!

[erron]

Sambahunta,

how did you make out with the timber hunt?

cheers,

Erron