My first Osage, and it made the weight! (Finally)

[Will Carothers]

I've been bow building for a few years now, and believe me my patience is horrible. im always real quick to mess one up.

A few months ago i bought an Osage stave for only 30$

I trimmed the end with the knot, and it left me 64 inches to play with
The stave was very snaky so i had to take it slow. The tillering is probably horrible, but it feels right.

Specs:
63'' ntn
1/8'' from centershot
55#@28
60#@29
and 65#@30

By the way, my goal is to be shooting 90-100#+ by the end of the summer, so im pulling to 30" now.

So here's the bow

unbraced (Back)

Braced (upper limb belly and arrow rest)

Top and bottom limb Bend (thoughts)
And the brace pic, i have the temp string at fistmele or about 6"

And the money shot

[soy]

Yes sir ...congratulations  love the snakey stuff

[gstoneberg]

Nice work, I like that bow a lot.  Good luck in your quest to pull more weight.

George

[Badger]

Good job on that bow, those knoty limbs can be hard to tiller.

[Pat B]

You got a very nice bend in that snakey bow. Well done, Will.
  When I finally learned patience my bows became more than badly bent sticks.  For me that was the hardest part of bow building to learn. It took me many years!

[criveraville]

Congrats on that snakey bow.  How wide is it?  I have some snake belly rawhide you could put on her. If you're interested in it PM the width. It will be a gift for your snakey bow.

Cipriano

[ErictheViking]

Very impressive Will, love the way it's so snakey.

[coaster500]

That's a great job, got to love the snakey ones!!!

[DarkSoul]

Good job! That is a very nice snakey stave and those are notoriously difficult to deal with. But you followed that grain beautifully. Tillering those bows are also not easy and I think you can still improve in that aspect.

Specs:
63'' ntn
1/8'' from centershot
55#@28
60#@29
and 65#@30"

By the way, my goal is to be shooting 90-100#+ by the end of the summer, so im pulling to 30" now.

Are you sure about those drawweights? Did you use an accurate scale? It picks up 5 pounds per inch of drawlength? That's a LOT from a stave this short. My guess is that has to do with stacking. The money shot is very small, but big enough to see that the string angle is more than 90 degrees. My guess is that the sudden jump up in drawweight is due to poor tillering, causing the string angle to exceed 90 degrees. Stacking is an inefficient process in a bow; while the drawweight might be as high as 65 pounds, it may shoot an arrow as fast as a 55 pound bow. If this bow is just for training purposes to work your way up to 90#, that's not a problem since your muscles are still pulling 65#. But if you want to make a fast and pleasant shooter, this is not the tiller profile. Luckily osage can take this tiller, but if it were a whitewood....

Again, good job on this piece of osage! Now get a new one and make her 70#

[Pappy]

Nice work on a challenging piece of wood,Congrats on that one.
   Pappy

[blackhawk]

Congrats on your first osage....i still have my first and ill never let that one go. Darksoul gave ya some decent advice.

[lesken2011]

Nice work on that piece of curvy wood. With a snakeskin back, I wouldn't leave it laying in the grass! Somebody might come along and shoot it!

[Will Carothers]

Thank you all for the complements, and i definitely know that the tillering is off. But i decided to remeasure and its actually 62 ntn and the weights:
59#@28"
62#@29"
66#@30.5"

I decided to do each one a few times and these were the averages

 

[Will Carothers]

Here is a short video of how it shoots, and a quick look at the tiller, i say in the video that it's 75# but that was an estimate before i actually weighed it.