Grow a Bow?

Thanks Dell.You are the Bow Master,and your opinion is highly regarded.

I am a patient man,and can wait for the bow to grow.It would seem to an non familiar person,that with the grain flowing with the bow it would be less apt to break,even in a recurve shape.

I also have some Hickory trees that I intend to cut.Are they good candidates for a bow?I know it is a very hard wood,similar to pecan,and hard to tell the difference when milled and dried.

I have no idea how the wood fibers change when steamed,but I would think that the inside ones would compress,and the outside ones would stretch.Wood that grows in the curved shape would have fibers growing that way instead.Maybe it would have less strength that steamed?Perhaps the compression and tension are desirable to give more strength to the bow,sorta like preloading a spring?Just speculating here.

Do you know of anyone that has grown a bow?

Good for furniture....and fishing...but don't eat the berries use them for slingshot ammo...

https://www.woodmagazine.com/materials-guide/lumber/wood-species-1/chinaberry

http://www.thesurvivalgardener.com/chinaberry-tree-uses/

..."Please be aware that all parts of the tree are poisonous wear a respirator if you are making dust IE saw sander etc. I would use rubber gloves at least until the sap dries.Thanks Ron"...

..."It may be slight brittle wood since it is related to the mahogany wood, so, make wider and longer than you normally do."...

http://www.primitivearcher.com/smf/index.php?topic=12972.0

Should work ok...

https://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/bow-woods/

European and pacific Yew and Osage Orange rank tops...

Excellent link! Thanks!!

Great, now I'm getting into it, might have to build one myself....

DEL,

Have you tried the classic English longbow material .... Yew?

Del is an accomplished bowyer and craftsman par exelence..: Del’s Archery Adventures

In my mind you just get something that has the curvature but is not a bow.

The bow works because you are flexing the fibres against its natural position.

This gives the bow the strength and the power from the draw.

If you already have curved wood you just need to draw more to get the same strength and pre-tension.

I hazard a guess that growing the wood in the curve will not make a better bow.

The only thing that I am unsure of if for a recurve bow it helps growing the tips round.

If you look at a graph depictiing the strain in a drawn recurve bow you will find the areas that you can pre-bend and those that require to be straight to give the bow its power.

Why not use the Bois d' arc (Osage Orange} tree? Borrowed from French bois d'arc (“bow wood”). So called because used for bows by the Western Indians.

https://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/bow-woods/

I found this article. In the comments someone asks if Black Cherry any good for a bow and the answer they were given was yes it is but it needs to be backed by something else. Which means to me is that it needs to be part of a laminated composition.

Thanks for the valuable information on the China Berry wood.I did not have any of this info before.I am a patient man,and the wood grows fast,so I will wait,but in the meanwhile,I may consider splitting a larger branch to get the form,and to get in some practice.

Can you provide a link to that information,my searches have come up empty?

Thanks!

https://www.wood-database.com/?s=chinaberry

I started with a chinaberry wood properties search in google and worked down the list until I got to references with wood properties.