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hello and a bow wood question

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Postman:
Welcome!
Just a prediction - In a year's time, you will not only be spotting osage trees at a mile's distance, you will be knocking on doors asking if they want that useless, thorny beast removed. ;)

arthur_the_great:
 :laugh:
 I hope so postman  :)

osage outlaw:
Lets see, it's very crooked, and has thorns.  Yep, that's osage.  The wood will be a yellow-orange color with a thin ring of white sapwood just under the bark.  The hard part is finding one that has a straight section long enough to make a bow from.  Look at the bark and try to find one that doesn't have any twist to it.  And the thicker the growth rings the better.  You want thick dark rings and thin lighter colored rings.  When you cut one, seal the ends with glue, shellac, or polyurethane as soon as you can.  I seal the ends as soon as the tree hits the gound.  Then you get to the fun part, splitting it and removing the bark and sapwood.

Hickory is also another good bow wood as JW mentioned.  Especially if you are in a dry climate like texas.

gstoneberg:
I'm not sure osage goes that far south,  Crooked and thorny also matches mesquite and I'm real sure that grows down there.  If the heartwood is brown it's mesquite, it it's yellow it's osage.  Are there pecan trees down there?  You can build bows from that for sure.  Otherwise I'm hosting an osage tree cutting up by Dallas in 2 weeks if you can get here.

George

arthur_the_great:
I'm not going to be ready to do osage bow for a little while i still haven't made one bow yet (unless you one from pvc)
I'm sure that the tree is osage we had to some branchs they were up against the house wall they were bright yellow almost whight

what would be awesome is if i could all cedar in the area
it make up just over half the trees in the area about half of whats left is one type of oak or another
the rest is minor amounts about a dozen different trees

one of the threads in the bows board its labeled First Bow someone  made a juniper bow its been posted in today so its fairly recent

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