 Oh my gosh this thing's popping. Welcome back to the channel everybody. We've got ourselves a nasty post-frontal day. I literally just got the boat back. I was filming some Guggen Squad videos this last week. Trollen motor cable snapped and I just got it back. I was excited to go fishing. Weather was warming up and boom! We just had this these nasty. It was a hail storm last night. Temperatures have dropped like 40 degrees. You know what are you gonna do? Texas spring. In today's video I want to show you what I've been working on as far as making bows and arrows for going hunting in the fall. Now I'll tell you I am not an expert at bow making. I am not a bowyer so if you're looking for expert advice I am not your huckle bearer but I do I have built a bow that is decent enough to shoot. I've been practicing with it every day that I feel confident in and I'm building another one right now and I'm building arrows just in my off time in between fishing and it's just kind of a project that I'm keeping up with. I feel like I've been doing it enough now that I can show it on video show you guys my progress and this is going to be something that I'm doing all through the fall really and it's about to be turkey season where we can get some more turkey feathers. Probably gonna do some hog stocks in the summer to try to get ready for deer season. My whole goal with this is to be able to take a whitetail deer with a bow and arrow that I have made. So this is something cool that anybody can do really if you've got access to wood you can even do it with lumber. I just happen to live in the woods and I've got tons of trees and I'm not using the best of staves and I'll show you guys that here in a second but let's go get in the in the garage in the cave and I'll show you what I'm working on right now. Alright we're in the cave and I just want to walk you guys through the evolution of how I got here started just getting really curious about the craftsmanship of how these how these Native Americans built these amazing bows just incredible with the tools that they had you know I got a couple books and just started reading about it and anyway bows and arrows Native Americans this is a great book the bow years Bible this is big basically this book into this as well with a bunch of other bow years and that gives you every detail that you want there's also tons of videos online but I'll leave this link down below if you guys are looking to get into it I recommend those another YouTube channel I would watch is Ryan Gill Hump Primitive I think it is his channel he he explains everything really well actually I talked to him on the phone he gave me some some tips first bow you guys haven't seen this yet I had a piece of Mexican plum wood that was grown into a cedar tree I just needed to cut it down it was it was in the way so I cut it down I was like you know what I'm gonna try to make a bow I've been I've been reading about this I I'm gonna try it sucks you know it's got a propeller twist it's all bent up but I had fun doing it that's the point and I pulled it back a few times put some bank line on it and it cracked I heard it crack I tried to fix it but probably had a 15-pound drawer not gonna kill anything with that then I had another piece of wood that I've been laying out in the yard for probably over a year and I was like I either need to make this into firewood or something so I was like I'm gonna make a bow out of that it was white ash I say was because it's now broken and I tried to get cute with it I I did all the mathematics lining everything up and took me a long time to make it I even put a recurve in it and it broke you know just it wasn't strong enough to hold what I was what I was pulling back and then there was this old road on the deer lease where we've got a ton of push-down cedars there was a dozer that went in there and built a road for a pipe basically and push down a bunch of oaks and cedars so I was like well I want to take some of those cedars and try to do a bow with that and I did and that's the one I've been shooting and it's great and I showed you guys this in my update video but since then I've put a recurve on the tips and I put some bacon grease on it to kind of cure it sanded it down really fine so it's really smooth this is a long bow but now again it shoots pretty decent I'm learning to shoot primitively on this bow and I really like it doesn't even have a handle yet 35 pounds it's worn enough to kill a deer at 15 yards I'm pretty accurate with it so we'll shoot this a little bit today and then hopefully we're going to get this one shooting so this is what I have been working on recently and this is essentially still a stave there was a tree in my parents yard they have a bow dart tree or an Osage orange tree and this is the holy grail of bow woods it's that and you would which grows out west and this one's very the elasticity the the the toughness just the strength of this they make really fast tough bows and this is this is ultimately what you want problem with Osage is there's usually a lot of twists and knots and all sorts of things and that is exactly what I have I have a chunky piece of Osage but it's what I have available to me it grows natively in the Red River Valley so being here in Texas we've got a lot of it so ultimately I'm going to find a really good tree and take the time let it season for a year or so and then make a really really good bow but I'm just learning so this is what I got to work with the tree was the branch is basically dead so it's it's pretty much dried out already it had carpenter hands all in it killed hundreds of them coming out of the wood it's terrible I still have some in the back of this bow and then when I got it home I basically split the wood I split it in half it was it was about the size of a grapefruit and then I started just working the bow to try to get it roughing out a bow essentially now most people use a draw knife to do that I don't have a draw knife I have a machete which is it's like a heavier machete that's essentially a glorified lawnmower blade I love this little tool but I can I can basically use it as a draw knife I can chop with it and I can also do do small little carvings if I need to so this is what I've been using it's what I'm comfortable with but you know if you're gonna do this I would just recommend getting a draw knife and what I did was I found a growth ring and I just started working that down the back of the bow the back of the bow is what faces away from you the belly is what faces towards you faces towards your belly so I started working that growth ring down and I think I have it fairly close to being one solid layer of growth on the outside I think like I said this is my first time doing this Osage is different in that way where you are working your growth ring whereas other woods you don't really have to but to get the most out of the Osage that's what you want to do and essentially it's like you have one layer on the outside you're not cutting through the layers of wood and making it weaker someone it bends back you might have a weak point that can split that's the idea of it so from here all we got to do guys is is just get our center of our bow which is probably gonna be right where this knot is unfortunately and we have to tiller it down and tillering just means shaving down the belly of the bow we're not we're not gonna work on the the back at all we're gonna shave down the belly of the bow to make it bend and then we're also going to build an arrow I'm gonna show you guys how to build an arrow from a shaft basically so let's start tillering our Osage down and let's get it into a shootable bow is to make a make a natural little taper it's kind of going with the grains in the wood we'll see how that works out just got to be really careful around those knot zones so it's not just holding a lot of there's a lot of fibrous material stuck to it so if you bust a knot bust a knot when you bust game saying if you if you pop a knot with your knife or your blade or whatever you do it really hard it will essentially overrun into the deeper grains of wood that you don't want to get into so this is this is kind of the art of it right here is working with the wood watching it seeing what it wants to do just working with it rather than against it taking your time at the end you've got a weapon that you can go out into the woods not with but it's also a piece of art just gonna take a few more chunks out of the belly here with a machete little bit of room to work to point where I can't do that anymore because I like I just hit a knot down here at the end and it chunked it like I was talking about I said don't do it don't don't bust the knot and I did see if we have a bend at all oh so safe so stiff barely micro bend get a lot more work to do grinding but I finally got a bow with little bit check this out very slight but there's a bit so I'm gonna just clean up the ends a little bit and I'm gonna notch gonna put some notches in it for putting a string on and then we will start the tillering process yeah you can probably tell about the shavings on the ground that we're doing a lot of work out here so I've got a little rope that I'm gonna attach string to got a string right here we're notched on both ends now and now it's just making making the little adjustments so I've got a little bend I'm just gonna keep looking at that bend and I'm gonna take my knife and my machete I'm gonna make a little adjustments and this is why I like my machete I can literally do everything with it but when it comes to making these small adjustments I can take the flat side and I can press it against and I come away with with that right there so you can't do this with every machete this is one of my bark river machetes it's got a 90 degree spine that you can do stuff like this with that's why I love love these knives and bark river makes but I'm just gonna continue to do that make those little shaving adjustments until it's got a good bend all right I got it on my little post right here just got a piece of a paracord attached to it it does have a string on it now I'm just gonna pull and look at it still extremely extremely tight a little twist in it too it's not helping things not pretty but definitely need to take out more here and then just a lot throughout the whole thing it's probably like an 80 pound bow right now won't be pulling that one back my name was Turok dollar at me if you know what Turok is okay we're starting to get some flex now well there's really there's really no flexing in the tips need to take a bunch off there but we're making progress this bowdark is serious super super stiff this doesn't break it's gonna be a fast bow this is all it is at this point is I'm just looking at the tiller up there and I'm seeing okay I need to make some adjustments you know here there and I'm just taking the knife scraping like this very similar to what I was doing with the machete and if you really get going with it'll actually take off a lot of material but I'll stab myself in the leg there probably gonna have to do some do some shaping around that handle make it fit my hand better just feel more natural I'm basically just gripping a big knot sucks but yeah in a matter of half a day we've gotten it to a to a workable bow it's not a long-term hunting bow yet I don't even know if it's gonna make it past test shooting but man it feels just really strong and fast so I'm hoping that it holds up new day almost complete bow just gonna hit it with a little sand it's gonna be time to shoot this thing not straight but godly this thing is freaking stiff so much stiffer than the cedar the cedar that was it's even thicker than this has like twice the amount of bend what do you think about my bow is it good you want to check it out you think you can pull that back you can definitely hold it all you got to do is hold this sandpaper and yeah rub it on the wood there you go that's a good technique you now feel it feel it right here smooth it is you made it smooth with sandpaper cool well now you can say you hope a daddy's bow sure did all right I'll let you go your still trying to figure her out you know I don't know if she's gonna be out in the woods with me doing all this stuff I hope she does but I don't know I can't figure out if she's gonna be a little princess or if she's gonna want to be in the woods and clean to your dad you have to be determined but she does practice her fishing quite a bit got a little pole and she sits out here and practice her cast she's ready for spring fishing hey do you want to get some chickens this week this like later this week sit kids chickens and then I'll leave and go to a lake and you'll be stuck with all it we're it's time to get some new chickens so we're gonna put it off because it's been so cold we've had all these cold fronts but now looks like we're we're done with it and it's time to get our chickens again or get a new flock of chickens let's try this hopefully does not break our I've tried to bend this thing and it's so tight still but I think it can be strong now so I'm gonna stick one leg in like this and I'm gonna put one into the bow on my foot down there and then I'm gonna pull with this arm right here pushing out with my hip pretty dead gun tight right there honestly that string is sitting decently on there it's definitely cocked to one side pretty ugly it's gonna want to twist in my hand but probably need to do a little bit of tillering on this while the strings on here you can see there's one side that's a little lower than the other just by a little bit though know the shadows are weird you probably can't see this but this side is sitting a little lower which means this is stiffer so I'm just gonna take my knife while the strings on here just gonna do some scrapes so when you're making a bow like this it's out of a natural piece of wood usually the string is gonna want to favor one side or the other which isn't terrible one of my first bows I tried to get it right down in the center and it actually is it's kind of a problem because the archers paradox is basically what an arrow is trying to go around your bow so when you shoot your bow you've got your arrow knocked right here it's it's trying to go around the bow as it shoots and a lot of arrows do that they can't do that they flex and then they end up going straight but if you have it just tilted to one little side then that will be the side you want to shoot on so you know most of these bows that you make out of a piece of wood like this I'm just making them very simple where I can flip them both ways but this one I kind of knew it was gonna favor this left side the side that I shoot on because of the giant walk right there you see that just turned off this way and actually this this little knot right here which was kind of my only option as a as a grip I've got it to where there's it's like a pretty decent palm swell for gripping so string looks like it's gonna hit my wrist a hair but oh that's a that's a bow with a string on it that we can barely pull back I guess it's like well over 60 pounds right now by the way appreciate the the guy I don't remember your name but Cripple Creek knives guys sent me that in the in the mail in the field box been using it on these bows it's a great little little scraper knife for doing this so appreciate it that is looking pretty good what's attempt what's attempt to even knock an arrow see what it's like the this is the wrong size string for this thing is extremely tight barely pull it back I heard a slight crack when I did it really needs more tailoring but just see what we're dealing with here huh see if it's even pop okay hard shot scared I'm scared of this one scared it's gonna blow up on me or something it's good to hit it on hit the heart though first shot with a bow maybe that's saying something my gosh this thing is so tight and strong so we gotta get a long shot there I pull I pulled it back though like this far guys still needs a ton of ton of work but the middle knot not bad as acting as kind of like a palm swell the bow naturally wants to rotate away from me which is not good it's gonna cost some accuracy issues but the string the string is sitting really quite well for shooting an arrow you know there's there's not a lot of archers paradox that's going on crap if I can get this thing not to break it's gonna it's gonna be sticking out though my gosh this thing pop that's basically me just pulling back towards my chest shoot a couple more here as a truck runs off in a ditch baby yeah this thing is popping first group shot with a bow at probably nine yards but still pretty decent group arrows look to be flying fairly straight to these are probably a little too long for that bow these are 30 inch arrows it's normally gonna shoot on my compound in the in this other bow but I'm not gonna push it too much guys I don't want to break the bow it still needs some slight tillering like I said and I it's gonna be probably a chest draw let me shoot my other one my cedar bow and I'll show you guys the difference in velocity and and the draw here's the cedar bow this one's a little longer and way easier to string up so I really don't even need to put my leg into it I just pull up on the string and it's good sits way off the bow I could actually put a tighter string on this and have it sit off even farther but I mean just you could tell guys I can go full draw with this thing like no no problem and it's probably 35 pounds but it's a very quiet bow it's one thing I really like about it so when I go hunting with this I really don't think that the deer is gonna hear that the action of the the bow at all so low strong string and this one I can anchor point on my face so allows me to get get some good accuracy out of it but it is significantly slower so that feels about like that bow was drawing you know from about right here this bow I am full draw off there's a shot there we go and as you guys can probably tell my accuracy has improved a lot head one head one back shot there the bow dark bow the Osage bow might be a little thinner in diameter it has knots where the cedar doesn't but the difference in strength is incredible between those two woods I can't stand it I just need to shoot it one more time ten yards a little different angle let's see see how much string follow it has I see just a tiny bit of string follow right here and that's okay it actually had a little bit of deflex in it when when I started roughing out the bow which is which is great little deflex is great deflex is when it is it's bending the opposite way of when it bends during the action so this needs no re-curving whatsoever this is just going to be a a straight bow keep it simple so I basically showed you guys from stave to to bow the other really wasn't much of a process on getting the log chopped it off a tree and then split it in half and just started roughing it out from there but making an arrow is is important so I'm going to quickly just show you how I've been making my arrows and it's nothing fancy this is a very difficult process making a bow is hard but making an arrow is like twice as hard to get a good one so here's what I'm going to recommend to everybody that wants to try this just buy some shafts because to make this one era right here out of a tree limb you know this was like a limb I can remember what kind of was and to work it down and get all the bends out of it you know and get the right grain and all that I mean took me like 12 hours and I made three of these and I shot two of them into the woods one broke one I never found so to work that long on something and then lose it just it sucks but you know when I was first getting started I really sucked at shooting arrows trying to figure out even how to shoot these are very difficult and if you want to be very consistent and you're trying to learn how to shoot with a primitive bow like myself I just went and bought some some shafts you know they cost me about 60 bucks for a dozen so it's a little pricey but trust me they get a lot more expensive than that arrows are very very difficult to make and if you look at some of the original Native American arrows they will like it will blow you away the craftsmanship they had on those so here's what here's how I'm making my arrows I'm just taking the shaft these are great I mean there's I don't have to work these at all to get them straight they come straight I mark them at 30 inches and then I cut them that's what I shoot mostly to get a full draw so we'll mark this real quick cut it down stick it in the vise just give it a little saw 30 inches now just need to taper this down I've got a belt sander you got a belt sander you can do it really quick I just sit there and rotate it but if you don't you just rotate it in your hand and taper it down and I do this on both ends I do it very little on the back in where the fleshings are going to be in this front end right here trying to get it down to around eight millimeters which is what most of your practice tips and obviously broad heads and everything like that this is just going to be a practice arrow but if I at some point want to take this off and make an actual broad head what I would do is I would cut I would put a split in this going down about an inch or so and then I would stick my you know broad head in there and wrap it or I could do a glue on broad head so you just want to taper that down until it will accept your little practice point or whatever and when you get pretty close you get pretty close what you're going to do is heat that up you're going to heat it up and that metal is going to expand and give just enough to go over where you tapered so that's getting pretty close so I'm going to leave it like that then I'm just going to work the knock in down so we're not going to put a knock on this you know like your typical we're not putting one of these on here we're making our own knocks at least I am that's that's how I like to do it and after shooting enough arrows kind of learned how deep I like to not to be the Native Americans had all different styles of knocks some actually had a protrusion in the back where they had kind of grip it of Native Americans did like a pool a pull style pinch pension pool I'm shooting a glove with a three-finger grip so I don't really need that but I don't really need a deep knock either because I'm holding on to that with my thumb it's not like a compound where it clicks in got a nice knock and then you can just let go I'm not really planning on even doing that with mine I'm gonna be holding with my thumb and that's just kind of how I've learned that's how I'm liking to do it so that's what I'm going with that's the beauty of all this you can make it however you want it so a fletching jig I would I would highly recommend if you're gonna be if you're trying to go for accuracy and still do this for fun you could definitely just slap these on here using your your eye and try to get the same effect but it is gonna be tough the fletching jig just allows you to be accurate so I'm using turkey feathers it's about to be turkey season y'all so if you want to do this hang on to your turkey feathers and it's something that's really neat about these is is the way they split so first of all when you're making an arrow you're making your fletchings you want to make sure to use either all winged feathers or all tail feathers whichever you have on hand but then if you're using a winged feather use all left or all right something that's really cool is like normally you'd split these with a knife you just take a sharp knife and run it down this center here but with turkey feather if you find the exact place where it starts you can start to pull on that when you start to pull you're gonna you're gonna see this thing start to split apart and it'll start to favor one side so this is gonna favor the good side the bigger side which is great that's what I want okay that did not split very well normally it splits very well you have to practice it so the the easy and cheap way that I figured out to to get your feather form is I built a little wooden jig like this so it's literally just two pieces of wood so we have a left wing feather on the larger side and if you look towards the back you'll see that it wants to curve to one side and that's that's gonna catch the air and that's gonna push it push the arrow and make it rotate these are the Fletchings that God made and this is why I like to use it it's just cool you know there's there's more accurate ways you can be more consistent with with other Fletchings probably but these are the ones that the great Lord made and the Native Americans didn't have any problem taking animals with them okay good now for the fun part we take our Fletching jig shape here just want to line those up and then I'm gonna put my little vice grip on it be as even as you can there's probably better ways of doing this but it's just what I got going on and this is the fun part we're just gonna take this and we're gonna torch it smells pretty bad it smells like burnt air as you would expect and then just take a little scraper tool scrape that down pop it out voila a Fletching you need to look at the grain of your wood and you need to cut your your knock across that grain so not not with it but across the reason is it's a safety thing is if your arrow splits coming off instead of like sharding and going into your hand really gruesomely it will kind of just split up and fly around instead of going directly in your hand which is bad no one wants to see that so this is gonna be one of those things like impossible to film there's no way this camera is good enough to actually focus on this thing right here gonna focus on my finger no there it wants to see my face okay so I'm gonna I'm gonna cut across here cross here there we go there we go that's that's how we did it right there too well it's nice to have a little file to do this with but quite honestly a little little tip here if you guys are not hopefully you guys have a Swiss Army knife laying around hopefully you have one of these but the saw that is in this is actually really close to the width you need to make your knock so it's hard to get started or just take your time you don't want to rip the thing apart but that little tool right there is is pretty darn close you can also do this you could whittle it out with a knife and then once you've whittle it out you just take your sandpaper and you just rub in between there until you get a nice smooth surface and I just do that continually and I take a string and I go okay that's gonna fit in the knock that's gonna fit in the knock nicely there we go a little sandpaper action now this is where the worlds collide right here this is fishing line braid going on a hunting arrow I don't know what not this is called but I've used this a few times in bushcraft and stuff like that just making those things wrappings and things that works really well and works good for these arrows but I'm just I'm making a loop and I'm placing it right above this knock right here then I'm just gonna wrap around that loop 40 pound is is honestly pretty good diameter I found for this what I eventually want to go to though is just using sinew sinew like backstrap sinew which all of these years I have just basically thrown into the woods and wasted and now since I've gotten into bow making I figured out that wow that was such a valuable resource let's zoom in here let's go into my face again let it slip out of my grasp I'm gonna stick this tag in through here okay through that loop that I made at the beginning now I'm going to take a little bit of plier action here I'm gonna pull still holding now that thread is gonna is gonna want to pull through here see a pulling pulling through just pull that through until it it's about to hit that other side and then if you do a really good job of this you honestly don't even need any adhesive like it's it's a very strong way to wrap that and the reason the reason that you are wrapping it in the first place is because that knock is gonna want to split you've just made a split in the end of that that arrow and it's gonna want to split right there seek wrap it so it doesn't do that now take yourself real sharp knife and you're just gonna cut flush cut flush right at the edge of your wrappings be careful not to cut your wrappings just cut the tags all right now we have we have a very clean wrapping but we're not done we're gonna take a little super glue or in this case I'm using some Fletch glue it can be whatever oh yeah we've we've gotten crusty that happens from time to time doesn't have to do the snip thin layer of that they don't usually take an extra feather basically a wasted feather and just use it as like a brush brush that in and you want this to be very smooth this is gonna go across your knuckle so remember that when you're making these this is going to cross my knuckle how smooth do I want that to feel I would argue you want a pretty smooth I have some scabs on my hand speed up the process you could do this in the sun of the wind but I've got a little heat gun this wobam hit it with that until it stops getting drippy you guys have ever made like lures using epoxy and stuff like that you know you got to keep the thing rotating so it doesn't get drippy on you same thing right here a little tip right there don't come at it super hot because you can actually melt melt your threat if you do that so I don't I don't get it super hot so that is no longer drippy it is going to accept the fletching tool now so there's a notch all right so on the fletching jig you can you can look at this and you can see what it's gonna do right you know what's going on the knock goes into that little groove right there see there sits in that and then we're able to put our feather on and then each time we're gonna rotate this I've got it set for three feathers so it's a hundred and twenty degrees this clamp right here is a right helical clamp goes right there with a feather what does helical mean I guess it means that the rotation of the of the feather it basically just matches that so it increases the spin that you're gonna get so it's gonna make your arrow spin a little bit quicker you slap a little glue right here then little bead boom stick it on there let it sit for a couple minutes I hit it with a heat gun it dries and then you just rotate it go to the next one just repeat the process and then when you're done with that I'll just take some more braid and I'll I'll kind of low-profile the front of these feathers down just make sure that they're they're all even and then just wrap them up glue them up hit them with a heat gun and it is done so when you look at the back of one of these arrows I've made you see the pretty little helical match with the feathers so that is that is the goal I cannot wait to get in the woods with these bows and arrows and just you know practice a little bit they make some practice tips like some blunt tips you can shoot small game with you know shoot I've got tons of hogs I just I just need to get all the blood on the bows and arrows and and get get my feet wet essentially and then just keep practicing get ready for deer season but this is definitely something that I'm dedicating a lot of time to and I see myself doing it for for many years and when it comes fall baby I'm gonna be flinging be like Robin Hood out there actually watch Robin Hood last night just got fired up you know what actually I have an arrow in here I have an arrow right here I was pissed off and happy at the same time when I did it but I Robin Hooded an arrow and I just completed making this diagram thing and you guys see how much time it takes went out there I shot a three a three group a three arrow group and it was really tight and I literally shot the end of that arrow so anyway learning every day alrighty guys thank you for tuning in to today's building video well something I've been doing working on it's gonna be in a lot of videos to come during the fall hunting season you'll see me using these things so I figured I would go ahead and kind of let you guys in on my newest little garage hobby but next is fishing I mean we are in the bowels of the spring season we've just had these these cold fronts that's that spring basically but it is time to get the dangle on the crappie or moving up caught an absolute butt ton on the other day and you know some big bass as well so stay tuned for all the outdoor action here as always God speed and God bless you and the great outdoors