There was a question here about using dead wood for making bows not to long ago. Bows can be made out of long dead, rot resistant wood such as Osage or BL or Yew but the white-woods decay pretty fast. Still, sometimes you can find a tree that has been dead standing or broken and hung up and as long as the bark comes off quickly it will stay in fairly good condition for awhile. I came across a tree like that about 15 years ago while driving down an old bush road. It had been blown over across the road and I had to get out of my truck to cut it out of the way. As I was cutting it is when I noticed that it was an Ironwood and that it didn't look in too bad a shape. Most of the bark was gone but the wood was hard. Now as I was out there to get some bow wood anyway I figured I would just cut a log out and throw it in my truck to bring back home. Most of the wood had some white streaks in it where rot had set in but I did get one stave that was good. You can see that my bow making has changed a bit over the years.
At 63" long the bow is a bit on the short side and there was some character to it but it held together. It pulls about 45# @ 28". I had to scrounge around for a string for the braced and full draw but found a FF string that fit. Here's the bow
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