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native bow woods (Read 4413 times)
CanDo
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Re: native bow woods
Reply #15 - Nov 28th, 2006 at 7:20pm
 
Buger,
If the tree has needles and is not a cedar, don't waste your time with it. Otherwise you can test the hardness of a wood by pressing your thumb into it. Get pieces of pine, oak, maple, and hickory - do this then remember what the results were like. This will give you some guidelines to go on...
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cipher20
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Re: native bow woods
Reply #16 - Nov 29th, 2006 at 11:22am
 
You should probably just learn to identify a couple of good, common species and stick with them unless you are into experimenting.  Not all hardwoods make good bows.  Hardness of the wood isn't a very reliable indicator of the performance of a bow from which it is made.  The properties you are more interested in are its strength in compression and tension, among others, but those two are the biggest.  Learn to identify oaks, maples, hickories and white ash.  Those make great bows and are common enough that you should have no problem finding at least one of them.

Others that you might look into are dogwood, black locust and elm.  Eastern redcedar also makes a good bow if it is backed with something like hickory, sinew or bamboo.  In fact, most junipers make great backed bows.
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