What Did You Do Today?

[osage outlaw]

Maybe 

[bowtarist]

Didn't know if that was one of yours or not. Knew they were goat though. Bet if you wait til spring they will release themselves. Or clean all the gunk off and soak in warm water for a bit.

[osage outlaw]

I have a coyote skull that I need to put in a crock pot for a few hours.  Can I throw the horns in with that?

[Eric Krewson]

I glued up a BBO. In the past I have had a problem with the bamboo shifting on glue-up so I drilled a bunch of tooth pick sized holes along the edge of  the bamboo in the osage slat and inserted pieces of toothpicks in the holes to trap the bamboo in place. It appears to have worked really well. I can tell some of my holes are angled slightly in but I left a little extra width on the bamboo so the edge should sand down flush with no divots where the holes once were.
 

[Pat B]

Eric, I hope that pressure block isn't glued to the boo backing.     guess you could make a tip overlay with it. 

[Eric Krewson]

I have found the blocks knock off really easily, in spite of having a lot of glue on them. I checked my log book and found this bow is my 60th bamboo backed bow, most of them osage. I didn't realized I had made so many .

[bowtarist]

OO, I wouldn't leave it in as long as the skulls, but that should work. Like taking off a hoof, heat up the collogean and they should slid off w/o too much work.

[Poggins]

Went down to the river today and cut some osage , fellow bowyer Rodney came down and cut some also and I helped him cut split and carry some of his out also .
The time to cut osage here is running out , the smaller trees have a lot of sap moving up in them but the bigger trees didn't have much sap moving yet .

[osage outlaw]

That looks like some great stuff.  Awesome haul!

[Eric Krewson]

You can cut osage any time of year, the sap being up or down doesn't matter.

[Poggins]

I've had some problems with osage cut later in the year , not every tree but some of the trees I cut last March warped and twisted on me , some had the bark and sapwood removed and some had the bark on , some of the staves with bark on checked and split in the middle of the staves .
The only ones I cut later in the year now are when a landowner dozes them down .

[Eric Krewson]

You didn't happen to store these staves in a place the sun could get to them? I once made a pile of bark on osage behind my shed on the sunny side and pretty much forgot about it, a few months later I walked around my shed and found a pile of twisted, warped, badly checked staves, make that firewood.......

I have cut more osage trees than I can remember, all times of the year and almost never have a stave that doesn't need some heat correcting after drying, it is the nature of the beast.

[Poggins]

I keep my staves in the northeast corner of my barn , the barn is open on the south end but the sun can't get to the staves .
Not all the staves warped or checked , we did come out of a bad three year drought and the wood felt wet all the way through on most of the staves and they came from three different locations .
The staves in the pic will make around thirty plus staves , been at it all morning staying around home in case we have a grass fire in all this high wind , if the wind lays soon I may go back and try to get one more log . The tree may not come down because the top is tangled in other trees , I may be able to cut most of the way through leaving a notch on the back side at the top and front side at the ground and pull it out with a come along from a safe distance . This log will be a little bigger than the logs yesterday .
I'll get another pic of the staves when I'm done , a lot of belly splits and some of the bigger staves can be split now and others reduced on a bandsaw later , love the fact that these logs are splitting almost as straight as if they were cut .

[Poggins]

I got the bigger staves split down and the belly splits, 32 staves so far from one tree , there are a few staves I can cut down on the bandsaw and get two .
The small cleaned stave on top of the stack is 2" by2" to give you an idea of the size of the others , the stack is in the corner of my barn in the dry.



These are my leaf spring wedges I use , when making belly splits they don't force the wood apart too fast and I get a cleaner split , they are also good when splitting the logs because they don't bounce out as bad , safety glasses are a must when using them ( you should always have them on when using wedges).

[Fred Arnold]

  hell of a haul!!!!