SE Alaska stave hunting

[stonecarver]

Hey it's been a long time since I last posted here. recently the bow building bug has been on me. I decided to get some staves and see what I can make. My last bowyer adventure I tried splitting staves, this time I want to try some sapling staves. The last couple days I road hunted these up and some Red Osier arrow shafts too!

From left to right, first sapling is a choke cherry, the next three staves are mountain ash, four crab apple staves and the split wood on the right is some sitka spruce for some split and run through the veritas dowel making jig arrow shafts. To give you an idea of length of these staves, the short one in the middle is 68 inches



Another shot:


This is the shortest stave a 68 inch crab apple, the top is oval 1.5 x 2 inches:


One more of the 68 inch stave:


Some wild rose and red osier I collected for shoot shafts is showing in the pics.

Looks like plenty of wood and shafts to play with, for awhile.

[FilipT]

That could easily get you narrow, bend through handle bows! Especially ash and apple. But I must give warning for all "fruits". Plums, apples, pears and such have really hard wood but they are difficult to season. They move a lot, like to crack and such.

If you want to make this apple bow, I suggest you work it down to rough dimensions of the intended bow while its still green and wet. Then you clamp the whole bow to the some steel bar or similar and put somewhere where its not hot. As you are in Alaska, I am sure there are no hot places.
After month and a half, you can start with tillering.

Month and a half is just rough estimate. My newest hazel bow was being dried for just a month and then put in the house for week and a half. That was enough for it.

[Parnell]

Cool post!  Always fun to see some "other" woods.  Best of luck.

[stonecarver]

Stalker, thanks for the reply. I recently read this thread which got my interest up for making a D-bow from sapling. I just order a few dozen clamps for taming staves.

Parnell, thanks for the reply, crab apple is my go to wood here in SE AK.

Normally finding a straight piece of crab apple wood long enough for a bow is difficult. The other day I found a patch that the conifers were out growing the crab apple and mountain ash making tall fairly straight slow growing trees. I cut down a mountain ash and a crab apple that were 2 staves tall and then some. I am not sure the ash top will make a good bow as it has quite a few big knots. The crab apple a top should make a very nice D-bow.

This pic shows the pairs of staves that were from the same trees.