I've been cutting brush pruning and cutting off some wild apple trees with the idea of grafting some good apples on them. Anyway had a big brush pile of mixed beech, maple, and apple saplings. Meanwhile I'm waiting for some board and stave stock to dry in the house, and that's truly as exciting as watching paint dry!
At lunch I read over the TBB chapter about simple branch bows and got a terrible itch to just go back and chop a piece of that brush, green as it is, into a bow if I could. The day was a perfect early spring day sunny, blue skies with a bit of wind.
So I picked out a pretty straight one about 2" diameter and just hacked at it with the hatchet until it was bow shaped, and had a taper down both limbs -- floor tillering it -- well, no, stump tillering it -- the stump having been the chopping block, too. It was pretty limber being green so I tried not to go too far with the hatchet tillering. Then I scraped off the outer bark with the hatchet -- it came off easily, and then scraped the remaining green stuff off with my pocket knife, until the bow was pure white and smooth.
I found a piece of concrete block, or "urbanite", and used that to rough sand the belly. The three tools used to shape the bow are shown on the stump below along with a sister sapling of the same size. I don't know what kind of sapling this was -- bark was smooth and light gray, so it could have been any one of the three types of saplings I cut. Branches had been removed, so I couldn't check those. But as a guess, it was a maple.
I'm posting it here to maybe break the contest ice. I doubt it will meet the poundage and length requirements since it's only 60" long and less than 2" wide -- and probably over-tillered already, but you know what?
It was FUN to be out there making a bow in the sun on a spring day, end even if it ends up a ten pounder, it was worth the hour or so it took -- playing with a piece of wood, a rock and a hatchet! It was like being a kid again.
