you may have osage orange, because you aresouth, but you may not ecause you are far south, i am not really sure.

i guess that you will just have to wait for someone that knows what they are talkingabout

Never heard of either oak or maple being used for bows, certainly not oak - it's not got the right flexibility properties - I wouldn't have thought.

I've turned some maple, but never tried to bend it so dunno about that :-)

I suppose if you get the right age sapling it would work.

i used maple to make a decent short selfbow, but then it broke because it was my first bow and not incredibly well made, and the limbs were not tapered properly.

lol - I never said it wasn't done, just that I personally had never heard of it being done - I have now :-)

so can any angiosperm sapling be used for a bow, not a gymnosperm

Live oak (the type with very dark bark, and oval leaves, look it up on google images for pictures) would almost definitely be terrible, the grain is usually very crooked, and it's just bad (there's a reason you don't see it at lumber stores).  It also grows slowly, so even a small tree that looks almost like a sapling might be 10-20 or so years old.  Most other oaks look like they'd be decent, although I have no personal experience  with anything but red oak (I'm almost done tillering my 1st real bow, so my experience is very limited).  Lots of websites have info on this kind of thing I'm guessing.

wanderer wrote on Nov 27^th, 2006 at 6:27am:


No, I think it's just an observation of buger's. Basically, flowering trees will make good bows, whereas most pines will not. I'd say it's pretty sensless to go by it though... just an interesting thought. As you said, yew, one of the finest bow woods is a gymnosperm (as well as cedar etc.) whereas I'm sure there's a huge number of angiosperms which would fail. My personal rule is: Springy hardwood? It'll make a bow.