Hey all. About a month ago, I cut some small-diameter (2.5in) Osage from a friend's property near Sacramento. There wasn't much heartwood-- too little to make a bow from, so I decided to remove the bark and rough it out to near-final dimensions and coated it with shellac. Squared sides, full width, flexing 2in, etc etc you've all read that part of TBB. Anyways, the staves stopped losing weight about a week ago without warpage or a single drying crack! I'd imagine that the limited heartwood helped here, as the difference in drying rate between the sapwood and heartwood causes a lot of the checking we see.
My understanding is that the sapwood of Osage is comparable to the heartwood in tension, but I've no clue if the same remains true for compression. I've been told that the sapwood is less dense, as with yew, but I'm not sure by how much. I'll measure the SG of both and report back. I'm going to design the bow around the SG of the sapwood and treat it like a white wood; even if the compression strength of the sapwood is reduced, the high crown of the staves should help transfer the stresses more to tension. If this works out, I'll be super happy!
