It is interesting how things change like a pendulum swings. The old, accepted dogma was that it takes years to season bow wood. Then came Comstock who made excellent, hard-hitting, durable whitewood bows from trees cut two or three months earlier. "”What matters is getting the wood to 9 % moisture without damaging the wood. From a practical standpoint, that’s all that matters”, he wrote.
Baker took Comstock's approach and ran with it, experimentally plowing through loads of variously seasoned yew, osage, elm, ash, hickory etc. etc. His data clearly supported Comstock's findings: getting wood dry is all that matters. Thousands of quick-dried bows were made all over the world following Baker's publications, even though even this approach was nothing new, just ask any aboriginal bowyer.
Many would scoff at Baker and his Californian kiln-dried flatbows, but he did build hundreds of yew bows, as well, out of staves seasoned in myriad ways and schedules. Result: seasoning makes no difference, as long as wood MC ends up appropriate. Too bad Baker bowed out before presenting his Seasoning methods and Yew performance data in minute detail, here in this neo-conservative bowyery era. It's almost as if there's an innate need to crush preceding views and make up something new, even if it meant going backwards.
The same caveat applies to professional yew bowyers today as it did in earlier times: these guys have full pipelines of wood of various age, never running out of years-old wood to make bows (and if your competitors claim Highly Seasoned Yew, you better follow). They have no need to use six-month-old wood, like the budding backyard bowyer. Claims that wood needs to be seasoned for years play in the pocket of professional bowyers, but more importantly, damage primitive archery as a whole.
Me, I've built a couple hundred bows out of maybe 30 different wood species, 90 % of it self-harvested and dried. I have occasionally made bows from trees that were alive just 10 days earlier; most of the time my wood sits a couple of months between felling and tillering. I have not seen evidence of any gain from letting wood sit beyond getting it to a low-enough MC (which can take a good while or never happen, if drying conditions are sub-optimal). Now, I happen to have a bunch of staves that have sat for 6 - 10 years. I'll keep my eyes open, as always.
Tuukka
