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Help and thoughts on layout and design (stave from Hades)

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fishfinder401:
bl would make a very good bow from what i have heard, but ill let someone with real life experience with it chime in, also do a search for black locust on here, you should get some ideas that way

JW_Halverson:
First off, completely forget about the twist.  There's lots of tutorials on here about how to take out twist.  It's mighty easy.  We'll walk you thru that when the time comes.   

It's become a mantra on here that "It don't take much osage to make a bow".  Your stave will prove that maxim.  If you went with 1 1/2 at the fade outs you'd have plenty of wood to make a bow. 

Get the whole stave down to one growth ring, maybe leave a small island of extra wood around each of the pin knot clusters for safety.  Give it a light sanding with 120 grit sandpaper to clean it up a bit, but only sand up and down the stave WITH the grain.  Once you have a clean back, it's easy enough to find the bow limbs in the grain of the wood.  I really think there is a bow in that stave. 

gstoneberg:
That doesn't look like osage to me.  Real green osage is not as yellow as seasoned osage, but after a year, the heartwood should show pretty bright yellow if you pull up a sliver, hit it with the draw knife or split it.  Osage does eventually fade to gray in the sun, again the older the wood, the more gray it likes to go.  Old fenceposts are usually gray.  Here's what 3 or 4 year old osage looks like that's been stored outside (both split and unsplit):

http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6199/6047430173_7959ac0250.jpg

You can see the belly wood has faded to gray.  You can also see the split reveals very bright yellow wood.  I'm not sure what you have, but I don't think it's osage.

George

JW_Halverson:
Osage or knot osage, that is the question.
Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer
The bows and arrows of outrageous staves
Or to take drawknives to a sea of Mulberry;
And by tillering end them, to shoot, to hunt

Whatever William Spokeshave meant by that bit of doggerel verse, make a bow outa that piece of wood!

Dclarke:
Yes, but remember that "The Stave oft proclaims the bow."  :P

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