Well, I got myself in pretty deep here.
I was telling DCM in a PM a minute ago that I've always thought I could communicate clearly but on threads like this, I feel like I'm speaking Spanish. I don't feel like I've been saying anything that should be controversial here and I've become the village idiot.
Well, the village idiot has one more post to try to show what he's trying to say.
I love our archery heritage. I like the English. I like the Vikings. I like the Egyptians. I like the incredible variety of the Native Americans. I like South America bows. I love teh African elephant bows. I like the golden age American flatbows. I like character bows. I like them all. I love wood, too. I have about 10 species that I have locally and love using. I've posted Cascara, Oceanspray, and Crabapple bows here and said that Crabapple is like Osage, Cascara is like Yew and Oceanspray is unbreakable. I have argued on this site that a good hunting bow can be made out of willow. Two days ago I suggested to a beginner that Silver Maple would be worth trying. I would try it--I've tried worse.
The reason why I jumped on this thread is there seems to be the idea that Osage, Yew and a couple other woods have made the 'first string' because of narrow-mindedness and refusal to be resourceful. Ignorance and narrow-mindedness will always play a part. Prejudice of that kind is a part of life. But, in answer to the beginner's question, I wanted to show that there are qualities on which bow woods are commonly judged. Osage just scores extremely high on most of those judgments. Yew is somewhere there too.
Most of us who have been around a few years have read a lot of literature about wood bows so we have all formed opinions about these things, but we should be fair to our founding fathers. Here are a couple things that come to my mind:
1. The English have always used white woods for bows. Ash and Elm were considered quality bow woods. Hickory-backed Yew was said by many to have made the fastest bows. Yew was a first choice but not just Yew--good Yew. There is bad Yew growing all over England that bowyers don't bother to glance at. Bad Yew is bad wood--they favored high altitude 'holy grail' Yew that grew 150 rpi.
2. The Thompsons didn't have the TBB to fall back on but they did learn to adapt their bows to different kinds of woods. They never made flatbows (from what I can tell) but they did make their bows longer to compensate for the lower elasticity of non-yew staves. They also bought several bows from England which flight-tested better than any of their personal bows so they decided that English bows were better.
3. Saxton Pope was a tester. He tested everything just like Baker does. He tested English designs side-by-side with every Native American bow he could get his hands on. The testing criteria was flight shooting. The English design out shot all the other NA bows for distance and he recorded this for posterity. We all know this, so why do we act like Pope just stubbornly chose ELB's without doing research? It would be interesting to see how the course of American archery would have been changed if a couple top-notch NA bows had made it into his testing and beaten or seriously challenged the English designs. Saxton Pope's research is long-outdated and none of us believe that the English longbow will beat every other design, but there was research done and I think Pope did make some very positive contributions that we can be thankful for.
4. The authors of the bowyer's bibles have advanced understanding of bow design an incredible amount. If it weren't for reading those books, my curve for learning how to adapt softer, weaker woods would have been so slow I would have died before I made a good bitter cherry bow.
But even the authors of the bowyer's bible books clearly refer to Osage, Yew, Lemonwood (and maybe a couple others?) as 'first string woods.'
-Tim Baker calls Yew, Osage, and Lemonwood, the 'strongest and most elastic woods.'
-Steve prefers Yew for Native American and English replicas he builds.
-Paul Comstock suggests that people who are building one hunting bow should use Osage.
-Strunk used to have a 4' x 40' pile of Yew in his back yard that he has used up. He still prefers Yew when he can get his hands on it.
-Harcastle openly admits that he prefers Osage over all other woods.
-Jim Hamm openly admits to being obsessed with Osage and doesn't use much else.
-The books are printed by 'Bois d'Arc Press.'
I can't find a single place in which an author of the Bowyer's Bibles say that all woods are equal. They say you should use the best wood you can get and if that's a second-string wood--NO PROBLEM. Authors like Comstock have shown that great bows can easily be built from virtually any wood if the design is adapted to the wood, but even Tim Baker says that some woods have more 'cast per pound' than others.
Perhaps there is a fear that if we put Osage, or Yew up on a pedestal beginners will quit because they can't afford a $100-200 stave. I think it's a legitimate concern. We should be encouraging experimentation and publishing our findings. But when we point a beginner to the woods we should be telling them to look for woods that possess certain qualities. I don't think anyone would disagree with me on this?? Yew, Osage have a lot of these qualities and ages of experimentation have made them very popular among bowyers. In certain places, Hickory might be the best wood--period. I totally understand that.
J. D.
