stuckinthemud

Ok , so, Derek is passionate in his insistence that British yew is as good as imported stuff. He has worked on foreign yew and points out that you are totally at the mercy of the merchant and they are not always fussy in their stock selection. If you buy local you can sort out the best material. I have used British yew and found it to be excellent. Witch Elm is an awesome bow wood and historically correct for the bows you want to start off with. Have you stumbled across the Wood Lots web-site? Most of the stuff on there is too far south for you perhaps, but its worth keeping an eye on.

It does, up to a point, nowt wrong with the Welsh yew I've used, you just need to be careful with your timber selection

Yes, you're right about some types of cherry, bird cherry (prunus padus) is the one you need, I think, but almost all other cherry has a very high failure rate so I would not recommend it to a novice, although as I said, Blackthorn is the very best timber and is also a prunus (p. spinosa)

Thanks! In the UK, sourcing decent bow wood is a real problem so I spent a lot of time finding out what might be useful. I keep a folding saw in the boot of my car just in case but its more useful to get to know local farmers, tree surgeons and the parks/highways guys

Forgot to say, apple is a fantastic bow-wood, my current favourite, and definitely worth keeping an eye-out for. You should also consider elm, witch-elm, roan and elder and basically any fruit-wood except cherry which is totally not suitable for bows. IF you want to practice splicing, then Yellow Broom is really good fun to build a short bow from and you might be lucky to find an old privet hedge with very large stems......Ash is not too hard to come by and builds a good bow, Norway maple is OK, and Sycamore works in a pinch and though its not all that great it does work as a bow-wood and is good for re-enactor's longbows

For timber sizes, the minimum you need is 2" diameter at the narrower end but this means the timber is very high crowned and only suitable for longbows. In yew, pin knots are inevitable but large knots must be avoided, in almost all other timbers even pin-knots are best avoided, although the very best bow-wood is blackthorn and it tolerates small knots very well indeed - its toxic though so do not breath in the saw-dust!! Really you need timber of over a 4 inch diameter. Concerning price, check out on-line auction sites, but I have heard rumours that the best quality Italian yew can go for £200 per stave. Got to say though that people who build their own kit are often the sort who won't/can't pay for materials.......

Ooh, billet bows!! A 10:1 v-splice using cascamite will sort that out. Mastering splices opens a whole world of possibility. Splice at the handle and hide it with a wrap, jobs a good un

Yew is the business, as is laburnum but your setting yourself up for a really long wait to get hold of any timber to use. Hornbeam makes a great bow but is soo hard you may not want to work with it. Hazel makes a fabulous bow - its everywhere and can be force-dried if you're in a hurry; its the wood I started with and I can't recommend strongly enough that you start off with hazel. Some species of holly can yield suitable timber, if your lucky you could also find straight sections of rhododendron or laurel but these need to be strapped down as they season or they'll twist all over the shop but they make incredible bows. Derek Hutchinson is one of the very best bowyers and you really need to spend a few days reading his blog, it will be a crash-course in bow building with British timbers for you. Also, if you need 7ft long sections, I guess you want to dive straight into building longbows? I would work up to this as they can be really tricky to make. Maybe start off with a few bend-through-the-handle flat-bows - allow double your draw length plus 10%, so if you draw 26", then all you need is a stave 60 inches long which is much easier to come by than 94" long. Also, you should definitely check out the Primitive Archer forum. Good Luck.

+1 on the knife and scraper, hazel bark is too thin for a draw-knife

Really nice

I had a piece of nasty-looking apple wood, about 3-foot long, bent at a big knot, heavily splintered from when it was cleaved, but with a lovely streak of red heartwood and every time I tried to put it out for the neighbour’s log-burner I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, almost like the wood was begging me to carve it into a spoon and not burn it. Anyway, I finally succumbed and after a few hours with a carving axe, rasp and a couple of big gouges this is the result. I let the wood do the talking, just following all those big splits, you can see there’s a couple still left in the bowl, though they are glued tight shut now. Finished with sunflower oil. Nice big ladle, with an 18″ long handle, the wood twisting through about 60 degrees meaning it is really comfortable to use.

Thats what I call speed carving!

Fibrousy is an excellent word

Simple enough question, is black poplar any good for chainsaw carving? There's a tree been felled a few weeks ago not too far from me that's been left to rot.

Nice to see some technique, looks like a useful piece of kit too. I couldn't keep my stihl chain cool when I used a dime tip Sugi bar, lots of black oil spraying over the carving. You run the saw slower and with a looser chain than I did, but I think I was too aggressive in the cut and threw the chain off a few times so then I tightened the chain up a little, though I still ran it loose, which didn't help with the heat. I also haven't knocked the heals off the cutters, would you suggest I do that with a stihl carving chain?

There is something about that figure. Nicely done

Very very nice carvings

Wow, step out of the room for a couple of days and see what happens! I'd like to see some carve-alongs, gallery pictures are always welcome, there was a beginner's carving skill builder about 4 years ago, I followed as far as carving a shell. I changed job so I lost most of my carving time. Just making some sawn disk stuff for Christmas so not had anything worth posting recently but I certainly will if I ever do get a bit of proper chainsaw carving done

Wondered how you know where I am then I realised the avatar has a location under it! Doh, I feel so stoopid!! Yup, shame you're so far away, I'm always looking out for yew, love working with it, hope someone 'turns' up. It does have some value, especially to bow-makers, but the logs need to be above 1m long for billets and about 2m long for bows - as long as they are straight they don't even need to be knot-free, up to a point. There are a few bowyers on Primitive Archer (warbow section) might be more local to you.

Where are you?

On fallow deer antler, the pith runs to within 1 or 1.5mm of the surface of the palms, the pith is not only porous it goes so soft in water you can cut it out with a spoon. Biggest advantage of working the palmate section is it becomes plastic with steam. This allowed me to inlay it in long strips into the compound curves of a crossbow stock. The workable thickness of the rolls is slightly thicker but the stems are not plastic with steam. Unfortunately even the tips of the tines have a workable thickness of only maybe 3mm

Looks like its a lot more dense than the fallow I use. Whats the longest inch wide strip do you think you could get from one?

Very nicely done. What type of antler is it?

I found I liked my gouges and chisels ground to a totally non-standard angle, I am not very tall and my bench is not a standard height, if you are a standard height and have a bench that is a standard height, then standard angles will work for you, so go with a system. I go freehand. A light vertically shining on the stone is essential as you should be using the shadow under the cutting edge to guide you. You will feel the bevel engage with the stone, then gently smooth off the metal until the shadow under the blade disappears. A ruby stone and a rubber-disk in a bench grinder loaded with chrome autopolish is the best system, but the best sharpener by far is an ordinary belt sander with a slip stone to maintain the edge

Insuring your stuff against theft and damage is a really good idea but although you might think it is usually the responsibility of the exhibitor, so your responsibility on your stall in a craft show, the shop owners in a gallery, etc, this isn't always the case and you should always check, one guy on a different forum lent some miniatures that had literally taken years to build to an international company for a major showcase and they were stolen when everyone was packing up, no-one had valued them, and an apology doesn't really cut it....