Thought about trying woods other than osage? Most people either live in places with good hardwoods around, If you live in the midwest where there are less hardwoods, generally a lot more osage there. For my bow wood I only need to go outside and cut it for there is white oak, red oak, various species of hickory, pecan, mulberry, dogwood, witch hazel, persimmon, possibly a few elms, hackberry, sweetgum if I was feeling masochistic about trying to split the hardest to split tree in the woods.
Sure osage is awesome, but it's not very available here as well. But I have around 60 acres of mixed temperate hardwoods full of trees that I can select wood from.
This is what spring time looks like around where I am, in an area that as been thinned out a little for firewood. The forked tree is a white oak, I think the left fork is the next tree i'm going to cut and split. This is just right outside my house, on in the foreground is a larger white oak, there is a good bit of straight trunk, when it comes down it will be broken down into staves. I'm working on a dogwood American Flatbow currently. Being able to just go outside, find a good tree, and turn it into a bunch of staves for free sort of kills a lot of the appeal of osage to me. Seems like ebay goes from 50-120 a stave, elsewhere on the internet 100 or more, maybe i'm just not looking in the right places. Personally I would get myself some staves from where I live, and trade them with someone from the midwest that doesn't have such an abundance of trees. Trade them a dogwood stave or something. I just can't justify spending money on it, trade is more appealing every time.
