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Message: <blockquote data-quote="flanders" data-source="post: 1120627" data-attributes="member: 13547">I live a few hundred miles outside of osage's natural range, so all the osage I have access to is cut down into boards by specialty sawmills for people buying (their words) "curious lumber". Therefore all the growth rings are violated all to shit and sometimes there's three or four run-outs per limb, and knots/pins everywhere. Low quality board lumber always needs a backing, wood laminate preferably. You could always go to a junk shop and buy some old carbon steel butcher knives and sharpen them into scrapers. The best scraper I own is a trash old hickory kitchen knife. A piece of glass from a broken beer bottle works great too. Old silk ties also work for backings, you just take them apart and glue them to the back. Denim or burlap isn't bad either (a guy on youtube did this). Getting titebond III might be a little harder, but you could always buy gelatin packets and cook it into hide glue. I agree getting sinew is a pain in the ass. Even if you have immediate access to animal carcasses, processing it is difficult. The only stuff I could get in any quantity was achilles tendons from goat/deer legs, which takes probably twice as much work as backstrap to tear apart into fibers. A lot of butchers don't like taking direction from laypersons. Though if you want butchers to get you sinew, just ask them to saw off the legs below the "knee" joint for you, 'knees' on most four legged critters are actually ankles and below that is right where the achilles tendon is. Then you just need to spend maybe half an hour cutting apart the first leg to figure out where the fleshy tendons are at until you get a process down. I've traded a few cases of beer for several five gallon buckets of steer feet and everybody walked away happy. I tried a sinew backed plum bow on a recommendation from paleoplanet many years back and ended up throwing it away ... what a shame ... those short sinew fibers are harder to reclaim from a back than longer backstrap sinew. It was dumb not to have tried though. Probably put 50-60 hours worth of effort into just that one. That's kind of why I burned out on archery though, it can be time intensive (rewarding too though) and I have the personality type to always be picking up projects, half finishing them, always being kind of dissatisfied with my old work. I tried getting some blue collar friends involved in it but they seemed pretty bad at it (weren't really committed enough either, not even two or three hours per week). When I can dig some stuff out of storage I'll post some pictures. Yeah, the second one - fade width. I tried making one with roughly an 8" handle that would avoid all that noise but it just wouldn't come out right. I've heard nothing but good things about locust, and it looks awesome when finished. I've even seen some locust sapling bows with sapwood backs that performed well and generally had strong aesthetics. I wish it grew here. I mostly used walnut for laminate bow handles, bow tips, knife handles, or the like. It's too pretty to be used for bows haha. Where I'm at it's a lot of bur oak, .. varieties of ashes, hornbeams/ironwood, hackberry. Not many monstrously large elms anymore. Too much goddamned box elder. Man all this lumber talk has me wanting to go to the woods and cut some shit down. The earlywood/latewood thing never concerned me, I just made sure to never cut anything down in the winter since debarking is unnecessary labor.</blockquote>

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