Looking for advice on fresh wood

[pinhead52]

I just came into the trunk of a water oak tree, and split it into what I think are 8 great wedges. I've read what I can about drying wood, but I would kick myself if I didn't bring it up here first, just to make sure I'm not about to mess something up. I would hate to wait a year to find out I'm storing 250 lbs of long fire wood.

I split it into wedges, making sure that each one was at least 4" or so wide (there was no twist in any of them, so I may have been a little ambitious with some splits), spray painted the ends, and weighed them all so I can keep track of moisture loss. I kept the bark on them all, since oak is a sapwood bow. Some bark came off during the splitting though. Should I worry about getting polyurethane on those areas immediately? My friend who is doing this with me thinks they will be fine, but he knows as little as I do about bow making. Also, they are being stored vertically, which I assume won't matter, since there's still enough wood there to keep the weight of the stave from warping it as it dries. Should I try to carve them down to bow shape now, or wait until they lose their moisture?

Also, I should be getting some osage orange soon. I know that it is a heartwood bow, so I will probably only get 4 staves out of it, and should remove the sapwood and coat the backs before they dry. Is there anything else I'm missing?

Any advice is appreciated. Also, it may be obvious to some of you, but my local buddies and I can't go through 12 staves before they go bad, so any of them that are still good beyond what we use will be traded here to anyone interested.

Also, before you ask for pictures, I already put them in the closet before I got my photobucket account, so I'll take pictures of all of them and post them this weekend when I pull them out to weigh them again.

[mikekeswick]

You can rough out a bow straight away. Once you have the feel for it you can get pretty close to tillered but for now it's best to leave the working limbs say 3/4 inch thick, also do not reduce the staves width to shape the handle at all eg. leave the handle area the same width as the limbs. As for width of the limbs I would probably go for 2 inches wide. First mark a centerline along the highest part of the stave (the crown) and mark 1 inch either side to make a 2 inch wide strip following the grain.
Once you've got your stave to this stage weigh it again and then keep watching weight loss until it doesn't change much for a week.
You can then proceed with removing some limb thickness to take you to a good floor tiller. Do not bend it far at all at this stage because the wood will still be too wet.
Then you could think about hot boxing the stave to get it down to about 8 -10% moisture content from there you can finish your bow.
Moisture content is quite easy to work out - just take a small sample of wood off your stave, weigh it with accurate scales, put it in the oven until completely dry and then weigh again. Divide the initial weight by weight loss x  100 = moisture content.