Well I gotta preface this whole mess with the story of how I got this.
Last summer I received an internship with the Mississippi Department of Wildlife Fisheries and Parks to work as a "Forest Inventory Technician". The whole jist of the job was to go from park to park and take data on the composition of the forests. I had a great time (despite multiple intimate moments with timber rattlers), l got to work with some great people, I learned a lot, and I saw a lot.
A few weeks into the job my supervisor realized my condition as a toxophilaholic (I think that I am the first to coin this term, so feel free to pick) and it turns out he had some interest in primitive bows. He had tried his hand at making a few different bows with varied success but he had never got REALLY into it. I got to share what little I knew with him and his interest sparked up some more.
The last week of work he came up to me with a request: A few years back he was working at Legion State Park, and he stumbled on a fence post. According to park history, the fence had been put in place in the 1930's, and was in a state of disrepair. He did a quick look over on the post and discovered that it was an Osage Orange post. So with his best estimation the post spent seventy years in/on the ground. He had grown up hearing that the best bow wood came from the "Bodock" tree, so he picked it up and brought it home. The request that he had of me was to split the log and secure as many staves as I could from it. My payment would be a stave of my choice. I was happy to oblige.
Now I am kicking myself for not taking a pre-split picture of the log, but I am sure y'all can guess how ugly the thing looked from the following pictures.
When I first looked over the post I was doubtful that there was a bow stave inside of it. There were cracks on the outside, the outside wood was grey and pithy, I could see grub holes, one side had staples in it, and it looked like it was hollow.
Nevertheless, I took to splitting it. After disturbing the slumber of a dozen wasps that had made their winter home in the center of the log (note the dark areas on the inside of the staves) I found some beautiful yellow wood that appeared, for all intents and purposes, very capable of becoming a bow. The stave that I am looking down in one of the previous pictures is one that I did some very modest drawknife work on to see how bad the worms had burrowed. It appears that they stopped at the yellow wood, and it looks (to my untrained eye) virtuous along the stave.
I might be wrong, but I think that there are at least three good staves out of these.
Here is the one that I am keeping for payment.
It might turn into a disaster, but my instincts are tingling about this one. I am going to take it real slow getting down to a single ring and I am going to try and follow a good design like the one laid out in Vol. 1 of The Bowyers Bible. Any advice, ideas, or observations are welcome and appreciated (I barely have a clue as to what I am doing).
I might take a whack at backing it with this guy and his buddy.
