Building an Osage Self Bow
By Dannyboy
So I desided my friend needs to make his own selfbow since he's been shooting an ironwood bow I gave him for a year now. We will be building him a osage selfbow over then next few weeks, and I will be taking pictures along the way to share with all of you.
Picked him out a nice blank from the bin with some good thick rings, few knots, and some nice snakes in it too. Here's Sam laying the line for the first limb thickness reduction...
Making the bandsaw cuts... 
I went ahead and did the basic handle shaping cuts on the bandsaw for him, since they can be a bit tricky. Here's Sam doing some more shaping with a rasp...
Woo, action shot! Here's Sam truing up the limb width...
And here we are reducing the belly even more to get it nice and even, as well as thin enough to bend on the caul... 
Here I am getting the stave all set up the be reflexed on the caul. So it's thinned, corners rounded off, greased with mineral oil, and clamped at both ends...
Here's Sam finally getting the stave good and hot, after a little mishap with the high and low setting on the heat gun. So we're slowly cranking down the bar clamp at the handle and adding c-clamps to flatten out any high spots as we go along...
And here's Sam acting like a fool, as we often do...hamin' it up for the camera as we get the limb fully clamped up on the caul...
Here's Sam heating the other limb....
All clamped up....
Off the caul....
Here's Sam working on the handle after I went through the finer points of handle shaping...
The fruits of our labor...
Sam reducing the belly even more and the sides some as well...
And here's Sam looking rather proud of what we've done so far. Really starting to look like a bow....
There was a little problem with tip alignment, so I desided we would heat that tip up and wrench it over. Here's Sam heating the tip....
And here he is pulling it slightly past straight while the tip's in the vice, while I went to get a wet rag to speed up the cooling...
The bow is starting to get a real good floor tiller, so I thought we'd through it on the press and see what the limbs look like. Though we wont really know till the first bracing....
I thought it would be good for him to get some practice putting in some nice even string grooves, so while the tips are still over sized I had him file in some nocks...
I threw out the idea of putting on some tip overlays, something I don't normally do, and Sam seemed really pleased by the idea. So, I grabbed my box of exotic scraps and he picked out a chunk of purpleheart. Here I am sanding down the tips flat so we can glue on the overlays....
And here's the purpleheart glued on with epoxy and clamped up....
Truely became a bow today, when it cast it's first arrow. Here's what went down today...
Here's Sam doing some tip shaping....
And here's me showing Sam how you really shape a tip...lol. Note the missing chunk o' purpleheart where the purple mets the orange. That dang stuff is so finicky, if the grain is wrong, which hard to tell, it chunks out near edges and such. We thought it through and came up with a quick and easy fix, I will come back to this later to show you what we came up with....
Sam sanding all the nicks and scratches out in preparation for the bow being really bent....
Here's me showing Sam how you can clamp the bow in the press and use the scraper while the bows under stress. You can actually watch the changes register, just be careful to stop just before perfect...so that when you start pulling it back and breaking it in, it will settle in at what you want rather than past it...
Alright, Sam desided he wanted to be the camera man a bit more. So, I have no explination for why I look like such a tool in this picture, just acting weird as we do. First brace, not bad huh..... 
Again, no reason why, just a strange boy. The view from the back...
Checking the draw weight. Over all we got it back to 57# at 21"...
Tiller a bit more refined at the point of the this picture, and braced a bit more normal....
So once we got to 21" I desided he should shoot it for a while with some shorties. That bow shot awesome, especially for the short draw and crappy arrows. Nice flat arrow flight out to about 18 yards already!
