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Character Osage Build - Now a Takedown - Finished!

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gstoneberg:
I'm relocating my character osage bow build from the Bows forum over here.

Here's the stave I started with, the tree was felled in Feb 2009, the stave was split out in Jun 2009.



 Here's day 1:









Tough stave, lots of weather checking and insect damage.

George

gstoneberg:
Day 2

I didn't have too much time to work, primarily tried to remove the weather damaged wood in the bent section:



Normally I would finish laying out the bow and use the band saw to cut the excess width away so I don't have so much sapwood to remove.  However in this case I'm not that confident the damage to the stave isn't fatal.  So, I'll start work on the bows belly and make sure there'll be enough wood left for a bow before I put in the effort to follow one of those skinny growth rings.



The darker wood was so hard I used a sawsall to remove it.  It was honestly like cutting bone.  You can see there are some serious cracks to contend with.



George

jturner:
Good luck on this one, I started workin one almost identical to that. It was standing dead, and hard as a rock. I made a scraper from a thin bandsaw blade to work the rings on the curve. the rings in osage around here are thin anyway but they were like paper on that one. Scraping it sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard. it made its way to my "someday" pile you got me thinking about working on it some more.

gstoneberg:
Day 3

Finished cleaning up the bend and used the draw knife to take out most of the weather checking.  Ran into some insect damage in the sapwood.  Hope it doesn't affect the heartwood much:



There are still some cracks under the bend that are troubling.  Hopefully these will be removed as I thin the limb at that point.



Next will come the bow's back.



Good luck on yours jturner.  There jury is still out on this one for sure.  I'm amazed at just how hard that old dead wood is.

George

gstoneberg:
Day 4

I started on the bow's back tonight.  The ring I chose for the back ended up not being deep enough to get rid of the wood borer damage:



The next one worked out, and though I ran the draw knife until my arms about fell off, I didn't get much done:



I'm out of shape for sure.  As an aside, a friend of mine is doing some work on a car in my shop and he brought over one these harbor freight halogen lights:



I have never used a light so effective indoors for illuminating the bow back while chasing a growth ring.  It was nearly as good as being outside in the sun.  I was surprised.  It also kept the area warm, nice for this time of year.

George

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