Often as I'm selecting saplings to remove, I marvel at their beauty and wonder what I can possibly do with them. Usually I chop them into short chunks to use as kindling in my wood stove, but last year I saved a few long, straight trunks thinking I might be able to find something to do with them. The best of them were about 10-feet long with a diameter of 2 or 3 inches -- not big enough for a rail fence or a post, but surely good for something!
I let them dry in my covered woodshed for a few months while I thought things over, and I eventually decided that I might be able to use the straightest one to make an experimental longbow. As it happens, while red cedar is fairly rot-resistant, it is the favored food of some insects. By the time I started making my bow, it was being nibbled and cored. But that was only one of its deficiencies. Red Cedar has fairly straight grain and splits easily, but it is typically riddled with knots left by all the small branches of the sapling. So I started my project with a pretty ordinary (albeit fairly straight) stick of wood.
Still, this was only my first attempt at making a longbow and I saw little downside in the risk of failure. I assembled my tools, watched some YouTube videos, and began construction.
The Tools
It turns out, you can make a longbow with almost any sharp tool -- an ax, a machete, or even a chef's knife. And, yes, one such tool will probably suffice, but it's helpful to have some others -- a rasp, a chisel, a plane, a spokeshave, sandpaper. Any combination of those will do.The Technique
Start with the best 8-foot section of your sapling. Remove the bark with your tool of choice (let's say, a machete). Sight down your sapling and decide which surface you'd like to have as the back of your bow. You want your bow as straight and as smooth as possible, so select the surface that comes closest to perfection. Draw a line across the diameter of the sapling at one end and begin splitting the sapling. Don't cut right on the line you have drawn. Instead give yourself a safety margin of about 1/4" or more.Use a block of wood or a mallet to pound the machete into the wood and begin the split. Watch very carefully to be sure the cut isn't going deeply into your safety margin. If you find that your blade is veering toward the center, you can try splitting from the other end, or you can pull out your blade and start over with an even wider safety margin. Keep pounding and developing the split. It may gradually trail up to the surface or toward the surface. If it does so, you'll need start another split where it began to bend toward the surface and take off another thin slice. You may even find that you need to do some chopping to remove wood, but eventually you'll end up with a nearly bisected 8-foot cylinder of cedar and a big pile of cedar chips.
The outer, rounded surface will be the back of your bow. You want to leave the fibers of the back continuous for the length of the bow, so be tolerant of irregularities -- though a certain amount of chopping and smoothing around the knots made sense to me.
The flatter, heartwood side is where you will now do most of your work. Chop, chisel, and sand until the stave looks symmetrical and vaguely like something that could become a bow. At this point you should begin "tillering" your 8-foot stave. In tillering you tie a long piece of bowstring (or even paracord) to each end of the bow. No need to bend the bow to string it at this early stage. Now you lay the bow horizontally into a tillering bracket that you have screwed into a vertical post or garage stud about five feet from the floor. The tillering bracket can be made of 1x4 scrap wood. It should be about 8" wide, 2" deep, with sides at least 2" high. The idea is to have a bracket to hold your bow while you draw the bowstring down toward the floor. Attach an eye-bolt to the stud about two feet from the floor. Tie a long strand of paracord to the center of your bowstring, thread the end down through the eyebolt, and stand ten feet or more away.
Now you can begin to gently bend your stave. Part of the goal is to make the fibers on the back of the bow "accustomed" to being bent and not broken, but the more important goal is to watch the bend to see -- and even mark -- where you need to remove wood from the stave so that each end of the bow is equal and the bend is smoothly symmetrical. Remove wood from the heart-side of the bow in places where it is too stiff and check the bend again. Repeat as many times as necessary.
As your bow begins to bend more smoothly, you'll need to cut it down to length. I'm 6' 3" tall, with long arms. I made my bow 7' long. I recommend adding 9 or 10 inches to your height and making that the length of your bow, recognizing that you can later reduce the length even more if that seems advisable. Having cut it to length, add nocks for stringing the bow 1" from each end. The nocks are cut at about a 45-degree angle and can best be made with a small round file.
Now you should begin stringing the bow properly and tillering it with care. The tillering process is what tells you how much wood to remove and where to remove it, but perhaps the dimensions of my finished bow can be useful as a rough set of guidelines for your project.
Longbow Measurements
- Overall length -- 84"
- Width at middle -- 1 1/2"
- Width at ends -- 1 1/4"
- Depth at middle -- 7/8"
- Depth at ends -- 5/8"
- Length of handle -- 7"
- 45-degree nocks for string -- 1" from each end
Once your bow is bending well and shooting well, you can finish it to preserve the wood from dirt. I varnished mine, but Tung oil would also work. An epoxy finish (with UV protection) would also be a good choice. You could even wrap the bow with fiberglass cloth before using epoxy; that would add significantly to its strength and draw weight. Your finished bow will be a unique piece of personal craftsmanship that should give you years of shooting enjoyment.
(Click on any of these images to enlarge them.)
Click here for a 30-second video of the bow being shot. The photo below shows the instant just after the string has been released. Look closely and you can see the arrow flexing as it bends around the shaft of the bow in the "archer's paradox."
Recommended YouTube Viewing
Making a Longbow from an Ash sapling in a day -- Mick Grewcock nicely illustrates all the steps I took in making my bow.
Making a Red Cedar Longbow -- This video clearly shows how to make a Red Cedar longbow from a large sapling with just a machete. Clay Hayes strongly emphasizes backing the bow. I have not found that necessary -- perhaps because my smaller sapling allows preservation of more continuous sheath fibers and my bow is quite a bit longer and wider than his. I'll add that mine is less refined and easier to make, but it still works very well.
Making a Red Cedar Longbow -- This video clearly shows how to make a Red Cedar longbow from a large sapling with just a machete. Clay Hayes strongly emphasizes backing the bow. I have not found that necessary -- perhaps because my smaller sapling allows preservation of more continuous sheath fibers and my bow is quite a bit longer and wider than his. I'll add that mine is less refined and easier to make, but it still works very well.
Making a Longbow with just an Ax -- This nice video illustrates what happens if the bow is too short and the limbs are too thin.
Making a Bowstring. Why buy expensive bowstrings when you can easily make your own?
