(upbeat music) - Hey there. I wanna talk to you about our show sponsors. First, let's highlight polite but dangerous tools. I've personally purchased three knives from Sam Curtis at polite but dangerous tools and later had them on the podcast. I use one of their super sharp nest mucks that's getting out of bear just a few weeks back with ease. Use the discount code all caps bowyer. That's b-o-w-y-e-r and all caps to save 10% on your orders from polite but dangerous tools. If you wanna learn more about Sam and has created process, check out polite but dangerous tools anywhere on the interwebs. Next up, we have Vuni gear. We've officially partnered with the great folks at Vuni. A few months ago, I purchased the vertical tee from Vuni for a pig hunt in Florida. After the hunt I wrote Brian, the founder of Vuni, I had worked to provide some positive feedback. And later, that led to a three hour long phone conversation. Then I tested the altitude pant and Helios hoodie during my Manitoba bear hunt. I wore the Helios hoodie for three days straight and was super impressed by the way the fabric maintained its form and lacked the tail tail odor of most synthetic materials. I'll be using the altitude pant and the Helios hoodie for all of my early season hunts here in North Carolina and I'm very excited to try out the insulation and rain gear during my Kodiak hunt in late October. Use the discount code, bowyear15 at checkout to save 15% off all Vuni gear. Check them out at vunigear.com. That's V-U-N-I-G-E-A-R.com. - Hey everybody, welcome to the bow years podcast where we explore the ancient art of bow making traditional archery in the age old pursuit of wild game. Together we'll chat with masters of their craft to uncover the deeper why behind reviving the old ways in the modern world. I want to wish a belated happy birthday to my United States Marine Corps brothers and sisters and a happy veterans day to all those that have served this great nation. On this week's episode, I sit down with repeat guests Dan Santana continue our bow year in the making series. During volume two of the series, we sit down to discuss bow design and layout, tools, bow woods, making board bows, how beginners can start this process, drying bow wood and prepping the back of the bow. Stay tuned for volume three of the series, which should publish in mid December. Remember to get outside, get dirty and learn something new. Now back to the show. - All right, so welcome to the bow year podcast. I'm super excited. We got Dan Santana here again, return guest for the bow year in the making series of volume two. So the last time we talked about a lot of just intro to Dan and some of the things that he's doing, all that stuff will still be in the show notes. But now today, I'm really excited. We're going to get kind of the nitty gritty of laying out a bow and tools and sometimes the challenges that we see and how to overcome a lot of those and just get into the end-depth details of making a random piece of wood, a stick that shoots other sticks. Dan, how's it going? - Oh, I'm great. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be back here talking about the technical stuff this time. - Me, man, me too. I've been really, this whole thing, when we came up with this idea to do this series, I've been super stoked. I'm really looking forward to it. And we've had about a month break since our last conversation and the intent is to have one of these episodes every month, which is pretty exciting. And we're in the middle of hunting season right now. We've both got a lot of things moving on our respective sides of the microphone and in real life. And I'm glad that we'll take this time. - Yeah, and it's great to have a conversational material out there. I think there's so much tutorial content and step-by-step content. But what I learned from the most in the past, I think, is some of the conversations I saw on forums and just seeing how different lawyers thought about things differently in conversation. So it's great to have a different type of content out there. - It really is. And I'll try my best not to screw it up. - No, this is all about stuff we didn't understand. It's about what we screwed up. - Man, where do you want to start? You want to start with choosing boat. We like boatwoods, you want to start with layout. You want to start with tools. You want to start with things that are hard and sucky. I'm all ears. - So we'll start with design and layout. - I like to, so, which sounds like a very technical topic and you really can make it that way. I try to approach it very naturally. For the most part, I use as much wood as the stave allows. It's hard to find a long enough piece of wood. So usually when I have length, I try not to waste it. And it's hard to find a wide enough piece of wood. So when I have width and I have length, I try not to waste bending limb for the most part. Sometimes you get a really perfect stave and you can afford to waste a little bit. But for the most part, I think, we can overcomplicate design and layout. And most of the decisions I make are just about using as much wood as I can. The main thing to understand with design and layout is to see the bow in 3D. Bow ears like to isolate the dimensions of bows. So we talk very specifically about the front profile, the side profile, and then the drawn shape. Because to understand tiller, like tiller is more than just a bend shape. Tiller is the way the bend is distributed over the profiles of the bow. So if you don't visualize the bow in 3D, you don't know what tiller shape the bow should have. So the first thing to design and layout is isolating the design into the front profile, the side profile, and the drawn shape. And once you separate the bow into those components, you can think about them each individually and how they relate. - Can you go into detail a little bit more when you mean about the side profile, the drawn profile, and basically all the vernacular you just used for some of the layman's? - Sure, so the front profile is basically what the back of the bow looks like. And that's basically gonna be dictated by the shape of the stave you start with. So when you're looking at the bow, when you're looking at the back of the bow, i.e. the back is the part of the bow that faces away from you. So if you're on the opposite side of the back and you're facing the back of the bow, what that profile would look like in the standing up. - Okay. - And depending on the front profile you choose, you're gonna get a different thickness taper. Depending on how the front of the bow looks, the side of the bow is gonna come out differently after you're done. In a sense, we have some creative freedom over how the front looks, but the way the side looks in the end is something that happens. It's not something we have control over. So you taper the bow as you're making it, but you don't necessarily know exactly what the taper is gonna be when you're done. So the side profile is something you reveal. It's you're digging up a dinosaur. You don't know exactly what you're digging up until you. You find it. - I think that's really interesting. 'Cause let's say you're making something that's not dynamic, like static, whatever. Anything that you can use a form or a template for, right? You've got general loose measurements that we can use for making bows, but that side profile, right? It's very dynamic in a sense where that wood tells you what it needs and has to be. You can't just trace out a template for a self bow and replicate that over and over, right? - Yeah, it's learning how to walk. The way to do it is you fall a bunch of times until you can walk. It would be hard to teach somebody how to walk by telling them like coordinates where they should put their feet. And that would be just like trying to make a bow by dimensions. Like that's a level of specificity which kind of doesn't hit the target you're aiming at. - Sure. - You have to go through this kind of process. There's not an end result you're specifically going towards. And so similarly, the drawn profile of the bow is something that depends on the front and the side profile. Depending on the shape of the bow, you're gonna have different ideal tiller shapes. So in a way, there's like a triangle relationship between the front profile, the side profile and the drawn shape where the decisions you make with each kind of trickle down and cascade and influence each other. And so I don't try to be too technical about specifying, okay, when you start a bow, here are your exact layout dimensions. I think it's okay to throw yourself in the deep end, not really know what's going on, but just know that there's a relationship between the front profile, the side profile and the drawn shape. And notice whatever you do. And just learning to walk, you're gonna, your brain's gonna figure it out. And if you wrap your information around that framework, you'll get going faster, I think, than trying to force specific dimensions. - That makes perfect sense. It's organic material, it has memory and we just come to go with the flow a lot of times. - And if you want dimensions, you can go to my beginner board bow tutorial and I will lay them out specifically. But once you're in your second or third, build along, I try to emphasize, get away from that. You don't really need to worry about which muscles you can correct when you're walking. The first time you walk, you have no idea, but it's okay not to know and your brain's designed to figure these things out. - And you're using great analogies too, Dan, because with anything that is worth accomplishing, there's gonna be challenges in obstacles, right? And with this, throughout that process, it's important to maintain a positive and latitude, use the resources we have, but also understand those obstacles are still there. And folks like yourself and others that have been doing this for far longer than me, there's still knots and crooked pieces and twisted grain that is encountered, which then you're starting anew on, "Oh, how do I overcome this obstacle?" Which I appreciate that a lot of bow years now is like, "Oh, that's a character." Like, it's not a flaw, right? It's a character bow or something of that nature now. And I appreciate that too. Helping folks get into the right mindset when they're going into this and things also important, which I think you laid out so eloquently. So we picked our layout, our back profile, where we're going next. - So one thing I just wanted to say is I think the best way to learn how to design and lay out bows is to look at successful bows made by bow years you like. And if you just look at a lot of these, get a lot of training data in your head, you're gonna start to develop intuitions about all these things. So I think that's the best. If you have no idea what to do with the layout, copy something that worked before, something proven from history, you don't have to reinvent the wheel with your first bow. - Do you, if you were to say aside from a board bow, if you were a beginner, you've made a couple of board bows and you got your first stave, whether it's Hickory or Osage, what have you, what do you recommend as being perhaps the simplest profile or bow design for folks to start out with? - I would say for the most part, it's rare that you're gonna be in a situation where as a beginner, you have bending limb to throw away. So usually I would say for beginners, look for the longest, widest, straightest stave you can and then use as much length and width as you can. And it's okay if for your first bow, it comes out a little bit overbuilt. If it's a little bigger than it needs to be, you're gonna have more margin for error. It might be sluggish, but you're gonna have a reliable bow that you can trust. And that's the most important thing when you're a beginner. Going for 3% extra better performance and then messing up your bow because of that. And now you have 30% worst performance. That's a horrible trade-off. - Indeed. - So for the most part, I think, at first you should go for safety. And then once you have an intuitive idea of where the cliff edge is, then you can get close to it on your second or third bow. - I think it's good advice. - Okay, so I think that's good for design and layout. Let's do tools. Tools are probably one of my favorite topic I love. - So do we need to go to Home Depot and buy a van saw and a planer and a table sander and drop three or four grand? Or what can we do here? - Definitely not. We used to do this with some chipped rocks. Home Depot is a terrible place to get tools, anyway. Like I recommend getting wood there from the board bow tutorial because Home Depot is everywhere, but not because that's a good place to get wood. Different cultures use different tools. And so I try to never say you have to use this or you have to use that. But there are some generalities between even people who are using stone tools and people who use power tools and the hand tools. There are some generalities between the tools. You want something very aggressive that can remove a lot of wood. You want something that's a little bit more refined and can remove delicate amounts of wood. Sometimes you want tools that go with the grain, sometimes you want tools that can go against the grain and so they're gonna be more abrasive. I think it's nice to have a big slicing tool, like something for your rough out. Like an axe or a big timber framing drone knife. Depending on what kind of tools you have, you might want to use something different. You could use a big old kitchen knife, like a big kitchen cleaver. Whatever your best chopping tool, you should use that for your rough out. - And I've seen a few of them. - If you haven't been like a... - Definitely a hardy, macheting, a decent carving hatchet a few months ago. And I've recently chopped down just like some small cedars and started to rough out from that. And now I'm gonna let them dry. And I'm excited about it. I was like, "Oh man, having this really nice hat, it's nice in what I needed." But an investment in a tool, it's just like, "Oh wow, this is just speeding up my process." Then using the random big knife and ace hardware hatchet that I've had for 20 years has been helping expedite that process too. And then I've got this one of the guys that's actually a partner or show, plywood dangerous tools. He's got this tracker knife and it's a heavy knife, but I can actually use like a rubber mallet and go through and hack away with that knife. And it doesn't show a single scratch. And that's been handy too. But basic hand tools to rough out, I think is... Also, I think the more primitive your tool is, it actually makes it a little bit, it just feels more raw and primitive, right? Like a man, a chop wood. - Oh yeah, it's definitely like innately satisfying to be able to remove that much wood. And I think hand tools are a good place to be splurging. You get so much more of your money's worth than with power tools. When I bought a nice axe, I felt like it was a bit of an excessive luxury. But in perspective, it was cheaper than a lot of bandsaws and I've been through so much more wood with it. And it's great for just your general tool-eye coordination. And the thing I love about an axe is that you can rotate the workpiece as you're carving. And so you have a better impression of what the shape of the object is as you're carving it. And so you're a little less likely to make a mistake or go too far with an axe compared to the drawn-eye. 'Cause sometimes with the drawn-eye, if you're not looking at all the surfaces, so you can go a little too far 'cause you're not keeping track of the shape in your head. - We mentioned having a short attention span be right before the recording started. But when you're looking at that six or nine inches of pull with your drawn-eye, it's easy to get fixated on that one spot and forget about the rest of the profile or the raw shape you want. And I get in that group sometimes. - That was a good point. I hadn't thought about that before. - And using a drawn-eye is so satisfying that it's easy to get carried away. And it's just, it's meditative and you get sucked into it and you just, you keep removing wood from the same spot. - I think it could pull me with therapy with it. - Not try to build a bow. It's just get some sort of nice, easy to peel wood and go out there and just peel away at it with a really sharp card scraper and draw a knife and just make a pile of shavings, man. Like you're gonna feel better about yourself in a couple hours, it is satisfying, right? - Yeah, that's a good segue. You want your carving tools stuffed to it to like aggressively remove wood. And then on the complete other end of the spectrum, you want something to scrape wood. And the advantage of a scraper is that it's basically a bladed tool with a depth stopper. So you're not gonna mess up by going too deep with it and you can work aggressively with a scraper. - It's, so in contrast from a draw knife where you can do a heavy pull and pull back many layers and be like, oh crap, now my really nice bow is gonna be a kid's bow with a scraper. It's got a lot more finesse. Like it limits you, it's self-limiting where you can only take off so much wood at once, right? So it reduces that margin of error. So is that accurate? - Okay, oh yeah. And you can get scrapers in different shapes. So you have the ability to hit exactly the piece of wood you're trying to hit. There's all different kinds of scrapers. You can get them with 90 degree edges. I like the cabinet style scrapers where you're rolling a burr so you can get really nice shavings that way. Scrapers are probably the most important tool in my shop. Draw knives are my favorite tool. So I rank tools by steps. I have my main workbench and that's where I stand. And then I keep scrapers at arm's reach. And then draw knives are one step away and then wraps are two steps away. And then spokesaves are three. And then I have sharpening stones or four or five steps away. Like I don't need those as often. - That's a good approach. 'Cause if that draw knife is right there, you might grab it and knowing you need the scraper, but you're like, I could probably do this with the draw knife real quick. And sometimes that might end up in a whoops. So having those things very calculated in that order makes a lot of sense for having to do the first place too. - Three on magnets right in front of me. And I can reach for them when I need them. But draw knives aren't that important where I always need to draw knife at arm's reach. I like them a lot, but they're not that important. Card scrapers are, they really are the most important tool in the shop. - So when we talk about these things, so we've got some sort of heavy edge tool, right? Axe, machete, big knife, hatchet, et cetera. Or if we're looking at a power tool, we do band saws and things of that nature. But generally the investment up front, I know my first draw knife I got was from Amazon, it's someone with the red handles or whatever, camera or the name of it, but I think it was like 60 bucks. I bought a rasp at the antique store for like anywhere from eight to 12 bucks. It was a farrier's rasp. And I still use it, I still like it a lot actually. And card scrapers, can you be like three bucks to 20 bucks a piece, right? Generally I think in that price range. And all of these things can, you can conduct maintenance in a draw knife, right? So you can conduct maintenance on yourself as well, right? You can sharpen your own draw knives, you can sharpen your own card scrapers. Although admittedly I've probably got 30 card scrapers because I hate sharpening them. So sometimes it's just worth my time. All right, Amazon.com, I need three more card scrapers, but that's my fault and people don't do that. It's wasteful. But then there's on the other end of the spectrum, right? We've mentioned there's some nicer hatchets and axes that might be 150 to 400 bucks. And for example, there are some really nice draw knives. They're like $300, right? I tend to go to Bastionhead, Tracy Chevron, and he's out of Kansas City and I ordered my draw knives from him. But their economic ones that they have are like, I think they're like 90 to 100 bucks and they are awesome. So there's just different economic spectrums upfront as far as how much one needs to invest in tools, but it can be anywhere from probably maybe 200 bucks to 1000 bucks depending on that. What about your table and your workbench setup, vice, et cetera? - I also just wanted to say that you should never feel like you have to spend a certain amount or there are no tools that you absolutely need. You could follow, you could do my whole board about tutorial with just a rasp. It's gonna take more elbow grease, but it's totally doable. It doesn't matter how you remove the wood. It's more about what wood you're removing. And there's always another way to remove the same wood. - That's a great point. - Look, I've seen videos where guys just go out with a big kitchen knife and make a field, a bushcraft bow. Clay Hayes, I think did it just with one of his videos with just like one of those Montana knife company heavy knives and just knocked it out and things that nature. And as you mentioned, people used to do this with stones. - I wouldn't use just a knife. Like even if I was using stone tools, like I would rig up two or three other tools. It's hard to make a bow with just one tool. That's like a particular YouTube gimmick, which is very fun to watch. But as a practical matter, make it yourself a second tool. If you only have one tool, you should use two or three at least. So we've covered the spectrum from your bigger tools, your axe, your draw knife, that kind of thing. And then you've got your finer scale tools, like your scrapers. And now in between, you have all kinds of tools, like rasp, spoke shaves. And these are like all a cart. I'm never gonna say you need a particular one of these tools, but depending on what other tools you have, they might compliment your workflow. Rasp's are really nice because they ignore the grain. So sometimes if you're having a problem with tear out, you can switch to a rasp and it's gonna be easy. That's the reason that I don't like rasp's, because I like to follow the grain as much as possible. And I don't mind if I make a mistake and I get punished because of that. I see it as being on me and I like to improve and get better with bladed tools because I'm stubborn. But I've also ruined probably hundreds of bows because of that attitude. And so if you don't want to ruin bows, let down a little bit of your pride and use a rasp and you're gonna have such an easier time. And if I were wiser, I would take that approach more often. - But you're cool as a cucumber, so you can handle breaking those bows. - Breaking bows, it seems like it would be upsetting, but it happens and it's an exciting moment. It's funny, like something happened in, rather than nothing and that's exciting. And it means you get to start a new bow, that's exciting. - That's a good way of looking at it. - It means you just spent time making a bow, which was fun. That sounds worse than it is. It doesn't get to me anymore. - And it's kind of-- - Yeah. - I don't really, I don't break bows anymore unless I want to, like when I break a bow nowadays, typically I'm kicking the ornaments nest in some kind of way. And I got what was coming. At first, you break a lot of bows that are surprising, but once you learn the ABCs, you'll have control over draw weight and how stressed the bow is. And you can always, rather than breaking a bow, you'll drop the draw weight, or rather than breaking the bow, you'll fix the tiller. So you'll start to see it coming before it happens in baleship or do something else, but so I do sometimes have builds that don't work out, but it's not that often that a break surprises me anymore. - I would agree. And sometimes I look at failure is a strong word, but when the build doesn't work out to, okay, it's not as bad as breaking it, but that can be discouraging sometimes, at least for me, where I've spent eight or nine hours on a bow and then all of a sudden there's something happening, where there's risk of a hinge or whatever the obstacle is, it's okay, now I need to work on the tiller a little bit more in order to do that and to reduce the way of the bow and remove some wood and it's not gonna be the bow that I wanted it to be, but that's also what's beautiful about the process that it's organic and fluid. If I wanted something that was full of 90 degree angles and mechanical and machined, I would choose a different craft to pursue. That is the case, right? I think after you get a handful of bows under you, you're no longer breaking bows, so it's maybe it's not as dynamic (laughs) but there certainly is at least where I am in this journey where there's still, I don't know, 20% or 10% where I'm like, oh, that didn't work out quite as I planned, but somebody still gets a bow out of it at some point. It might be the person I was initially building it for that had a certain draw weight in mind, but usually that means a kid or a young lady gets a bow as it's fair. - Yeah, if you're pushing yourself in your design, it's just gonna happen. It's a side effect of that. But eventually you pick up the skills where you can play it safe and not break bows if you don't want to. I have to be subtle about the topic of breaking bows because on the one hand, I don't want to discourage archers who might want to buy wooden bows 'cause they're worried about bows breaking. And then on the other hand, you want to be like encouraging to people who are making bows (laughs) or probably gonna break a bunch of them. So you have to be realistic about the fact that well-made bows don't really break that much, but also poorly made bows break a bunch. Those are both true, yeah. - But that's also part of what a quality control, like any respectful bow you're is gonna go out and perform quality control on a bow, right? That they're confident in that they may before they gift it to somebody else or sell it or something like that. I think, I also want to think a single piece of wood, single piece of wood, like self bow, long bow, recurve, what have you, is gonna be timeless. And that's typically something, depending on the wood, but it's gonna be an heirloom type product, right? In sure that bows can break, but a well-made bow that's gonna be an anomaly and not a norm. But also there's quality control. Like I know, and I'm very new at this, compared to folks like yourself and others. Like before I gift or sell a bow, I'm probably gonna put darn near 100 arrows through it before I'm comfortable passing that off to somebody else. Now I'm sure there's something that's more advanced and has achieved in your mastery like yourself and others like, I think you probably put 10 or 20 arrows through it and be very confident in what this bow is gonna do in this longevity and durability. But I think-- - I do, I do 100 to 200. - Well, that's beautiful. It makes me feel good because I'm typically going out and putting, like I said, around close to 100 arrows, probably through. And I'm just, I'm gonna shoot that bow for a couple of days and just make sure that I am confident that I can gift that to somebody or sell that somebody, put it in somebody else's hands where they're, one, you're gonna be safe and two, not gonna be disappointed. And so I think there are a few things more beautiful. - So there's basically only one good reason to not shoot in a bow before you pass it on. And that's if someone's trying to set in a flight archery world record and then you need the bow to be absolutely as fresh and crisp as possible. - Right. - And as under stress, it's humanly possible for the wood. Otherwise you should shoot in the bow and just make sure the tiller is stable. There's no good reason not to, I don't think. - Right on. - Yeah, and so there we go. I know we'll get into tillerings. So one thing, I just have one hiccup, not a hiccup, but I'm making a little segue. There are instances, right? Where after you shoot 20 or 30 times, you might have to refine that tiller even at that point, right? I don't, it's not common, but I know I've had to do that where I'm like, oh, wow, actually, I need to get the card scraper here or even just take off with some more sandpaper on the belly here. I'm like, okay, now the tiller's better. Like it just, whatever it is to that shooting process, something changed and need a little bit more refinement. - Absolutely, that's why you do it. 'Cause you're dealing with natural materials, sometimes the tiller is going to shift a little bit. And that's why I've moved on to, I tend to not like to stay in the belly so much 'cause that if you want to change the tiller, now you're going to ruin your stand job. So I'm trying to move to bows that are stained on the back or only have artwork on the back. And I leave the belly free to adjust the tiller if I feel like I need to. - Yeah, it makes perfect sense 'cause I've definitely stained the whole thing and then started shooting and then had to go back and scrape or sand and then fine sand and restain the belly and that's frustrating. - It could look nice, actually, sometimes to do something different with the area you restained. - Very true. - Yeah, you want to move on to Bowwood? - Yeah, man. - I like to start with Bowwood is when you're wondering what you should use. And I think the best approach is to Google what natives used in your area. That's your first big hint. 'Cause for the most part, you're going to see designs that have been like tested over time and you might not always agree with the types of bows, but there's so much wisdom in what designs and Bowwoods are successful in your area historically. So that should be your first starting point. And I think most people around the world are going to have several options. You might live in a place where you don't have that much. The other thing is invasive woods. Usually, even if you live in a place that doesn't have a lot of Bowwood, there are going to be some invasive options that you can use. Stuff like Black Locust is invasive. So many places around the world. Buckthor and there are tons of tiny little shrubs and saplings that are invasive that might surprise you in terms of being usable for bows. There are so many, but the main thing is historical Bowwoods. - I've got to ask, I'm going to interject what you can stand because something that you do so well on our bow year, on a lot of the Facebook traditional primitive making, bow making Facebook groups and things of that nature. And on your YouTube comments, when folks typically ask you, you make comments on your YouTube videos, you typically respond to inquiries. And so many people are like, "Ickery, you, Osage." And it's two or three Bowwoods are always mentioned as they have to do this. Osage is keen, Pacific you, this and all this stuff, all the time. And something that I love that you do is you echo, you're like any piece of wood can make a bow, right? It just depends what type of bow you want and what you want to make out of it and what you want to get out of it. Which has inspired me to be honest, man. Like I, we've got a lot of holly that's growing out here. - Fantastic Bowwood, yeah. - Man, and so here we go, last year I harvested one and it was like six inches around. And I'll be honest, like I've split that first of all, it was harder than any Osage or locus to split. It was miserable, but it's so twisted. I'm just like, it's probably gonna be firewood. But what I've done now is I got some of these small like two to three inch wide saplings that I've now harvested within the last two months. And I've peeled off the bark and I'm like, okay, now this, now I can shape all this with the draw knife and the rasp and make a bow. And because you said it was a good bowwood and it's so readily available. And at that size that I'm really looking for, I'm really excited to dive into it. And it's very abundant out here. But something you use so many woods through like your YouTube tutorials from fruit trees to, you use most floor rows. All of these other woods that most people like haven't even thought about, I don't think, and not in like a modern sense. Like I know historically they were used, but I think you do a good job of, hey, this wood is either native in my area or has been new isn't invasive, but it can be used. And let's see if we can, what kind of bow we can make out of it. And I think that reduces the barrier to entry one for somebody's like, oh, I gotta spend $250 on an Osage stave. I live in Florida, like I'm not gonna be able to harvest it. Or where am I gonna get Pacific U from? Which is also another expensive stave. You can probably go out back anywhere and find a tree, whether it's a maple or a birch or what have you, and make some sort of bow out of it to practice. And if you're new enough, don't go for the Osage in you where you wanna make your first hunting weight bow. Give something that's cheap and abundant first so you can work out some of your aggression on that. Does that make sense? - Definitely. So I would say about all that, that one of the most important chapters of the Boger's Bible is the Mass Theory chapter. So it's basically this complicated model where this guy is Steve Gardner, who has a ton of world records in flight entry. This guy's awesome, has sent arrows further than anyone in the world. And so he took a bunch of data and basically made a model of how much mass your bow should have given its design. So you input some basic variables, like how long is the bow, does it have recur? How much is the recur? How big to handle all that stuff like that. And then through this table, you get a number, how much should the bow weigh? And one of the really interesting conclusions of all of this research was that 500 grams of Osage performs pretty much like 500 grams of maple or 500 grams of hickory. Now, that same amount of wood, that same massive wood might not come out as the same design. So the hickory bow is gonna be wider and flatter than the Osage bow. But those 500 grams of wood will perform pretty much the same regardless of the species. Now, that's not, that's a 99% true. It's not 100% true. But realizing that's mostly true is a very important insight and means you don't have to be so tied down to Osage. If you want to make a bow with an Osage design, you do need Osage. But if you free yourself up and let the bow be a little bit wider and thinner, now you're tied down to specific woods. - Can I ask more questions about bowwoods? - Yeah. - So I live in North Carolina, particularly in the coastal side. And I read in one of the similar literature about the indigenous peoples using cypress wood out here. And to me, that's another thing. Like the grain of cypress is so twisted and tough, but like they used to make canoes and things like that nature of cypress. Have you ever personally worked with, this is just for my own edification, but have you ever used cypress at all? - I've played with it and thought, yeah, this is good, but I've never gotten a big enough piece to actually make a bow. And I've heard from enough people I trust that cypress is good bowwood. And I've seen it handle heavy enough English war bows that it has to be a decent bowwood. - Yeah, I think it could be. I think it would be the same as like the holly is like using a big chunk would be really difficult to make up to get the grain to behave a little bit. But I think some of the smaller ones would probably be. - Yeah, you're right about using smaller species when there's a lot of interlocking grain. So with these species like Elm, Holly, Hackberry, they can be a little bit unwieldy in larger logs. So I actually prefer smaller saplings with those species, just 'cause they're a little easier to manage. And sometimes you don't even have to split them. You can just rough them out straight from the sapling. And because of the interlocking fibers, these species can handle a little bit of runoff on a diagonal. So you don't have to worry so much about violating the grain and cutting the stave out rather than splitting it. - So say you've got a two and a half to three inch sapling and you're gonna instead of splitting it, you're just gonna bring it down with a draw knife. When you get into that center like that pithy core of that sapling, do you go ahead and go, eliminate that? Or you keep that in part with part of the bow? - You ideally wanna eliminate it from the bending limb 'cause wherever you leave the pith, but you're gonna get cracks, 'cause usually cracks travel to the pith. So if you leave the pith, you're inviting cracks. I often leave it in the handle and let the handle crack. And that's mostly a cosmetic issue. So I'm gonna shoot it all. So even cracks in the bending limb are not that big of a deal. People often see drying cracks and they get really worried. And so there's a kind of thought experiment that can calm you down if you're worried about cracks like that, which is to take two bows and put them sideways and pull them together. And then you realize you basically have one giant bow that has a crack all the way from one tip to the other tip. So it's like the biggest drying crack possible. Both bows aren't even connected and yet the big bow doesn't break as long as the two bows on either side are okay. So as long as the wood on both sides of a crack are sound, then you're gonna be okay. This is as long as it's a vertical crack, horizontal cracks are horrible and you're both probably rude. - Yeah, but most vertical are superficial. - Yeah, the drying checks, they're not a big deal. - Makes sense. All right, thanks for my segue buddy for tolerating it. - Oh yeah, definitely, that was super relevant. - Yeah, the only other thing I wanna cover with bowwoods is that we have these two buckets where we lump in bowwood. And this isn't really a strict botanical category or anything like that. But they're the whitewoods and the heartwoods. And the only thing that really separates them is what part of the bowwood is desirable. So in the whitewood, you use the sapwood. And in the heartwood, you use the heartwood. So an example of a heartwood would be something like Osage or Locust or Laburnum. And the classic whitewoods are hickory maple elm. And the big difference between using whitewoods or heartwoods is whether you have to chase a growth ring or not. So when you use a whitewood, you can just cut the tree down. You take off the outer bark, you take off the inner bark. And that first growth ring of wood is the pack of your bow. If you're using a heartwood, you're gonna take off the bark and then you're gonna take off the sapwood. And then you're gonna chase a ring of heartwood. And that's the back of your bow. So that can be challenging. So if you're a beginner, I definitely recommend using a whitewood, something like hickory or maple or elm, hackberry, that kind of thing. Hazel is a really popular beginner choice. - I think that's great. I know when I did the bow, the bow making course by with Corey Hock, we were using hackberry. It was really nice to like, we were basically using that first layer of sapwood underneath that bark and not having to chase a ring like with Osage. For example, it could save you hours of time and a little bit of sweat too. So it's nice to have that option if it's there, right? - Yeah, and there are all kinds of consequences and like mentality differences that cascade from not having to chase a growth ring. So for example, Boers who usually use Osage tend not to like saplings. 'Cause if you use a sapling, you're going to have to take off all of the sapwood. And by the time you do that, you don't have any wood left. Now, if you're using hickory, the size of the sapling is the size of the stave you have. So I've taken inch and three quarter hickory staves and made 70 pound bows. You really don't, you don't need much. Even like an inch and a quarter hickory stave, you could make a 40 pound bow out of. If it's a good stave, bro, you probably want a little bit. You want like an inch and a half inch and three quarters, two inches at least. But that's the other nice thing about whitewoods is you can use a much smaller tree. And once you're using a much smaller tree, the labor's a lot simpler, which is why like so many historical bow finds are elm and then woods like that because with stone tools, you don't have to work as hard to make a bow out of a sapling. There's just less wood removal. - And let's face it, it's a lot easier to haul out of the woods. - Oh yeah. - When you do it too, right? - So I think we can move on to drying. - Let's do it. - Yeah, there's a few different ways to approach drying. And the first one is just the dumb rule of thumb, which is to dry one year per inch of thickness. And this works pretty well, if you have a two inch thick stave drive for two years and you're good to start. The reality is a little bit more complicated. And the problem with that rule is that, obviously it's easy to stack up the years that you have to wait. So the other approach is too quick dry. So you can rough out the stave to the dimensions of your bow, but a little bit oversized. And now the drying is gonna take maybe weeks, maybe a month, could be even a week or days, depending on how much you push it. And you're basically making a trade off. So if you speed up the drying, now you have all these risks. Like you're gonna have more cracking risk, you're gonna have more risk of warpage, you're gonna have all these extra problems that you might have to juggle. But you don't have to wait all these years. The main thing to understand when you quick dry is how to use an equilibrium moisture content chart. I cover this in my YouTube video, but basically the idea is that, as you dry the wood is letting out moisture and it's also absorbing moisture. Eventually you reach a point where the woods had equilibrium. And so for every ambient condition, like in my room right now, there's gonna be some humidity and some temperature. And now you take those two numbers and you look up on an equilibrium moisture content chart, what the equilibrium moisture for this room is. So with that chart, I could know that, for example, any piece of wood I let dry in this room. And if I let that wood dry all the way, it's gonna be exactly at 12%. If I have different conditions, it might be 13% or whatever. And the nice thing about that is that you don't have to be keeping track of the time. You just dry the wood until it's dry. And then you know, all the wood in this room is at 12% if it's dry. So by monitoring your conditions, you can have exactly the moisture content you want. And what type of tour are you using to measure that percentage? Oh, just a moisture meter thermometer. That's something you can get your local hardware store, timber store, lumber yard. Yeah, any gardening store. I'm not talking, I'm talking about monitoring the moisture of the air and not, I don't think that. Yeah. So I'm not talking about measuring the moisture of the wood with a moisture meter. Those are, if you buy a very expensive one, they can work well, but the cheap ones I think are almost useless, the ones with the pins. Well, you're just gonna get a reading on the outside of the wood and you have to calibrate them. Often the calibrations doesn't go well. I found them to be like pretty much completely unreliable. And I can tell more by just touching the wood and seeing how dry it feels. If you wanna know exactly the position of the wood, exactly the moisture content of the wood, you should use an equilibrium moisture content chart. Because then you're measuring the average humidity of the whole stave, like even the core of it. And you're not gonna get thrown off by the moisture being different on the outside than the inside. So it's really easy, if you take a moisture meter and you measure staves that are dripping wet, sometimes they'll seem dry a couple of weeks out, but the inside is still completely wet. So yeah, I don't really trust the moisture meters with the pins and tend to-- - That's a new measuring process for me, man. I'm really excited to dive into that and try it out, particularly for some of these saplings that I've harvested here recently. In a perfect world, I wanna get some done before Christmas and I don't know if I am, but for some of the quick drying methods so I can measure them and be confident in that, I'm excited to dive into it. - Yeah, check out. My video on quick drying explains much better how to use the equilibrium moisture content chart. - We'll do, and I'll definitely put that video on the show notes too, just so they're breaking to quickly access that. - Yeah, definitely. Yeah, so that takes care of drying. I think we can cover the back of the bow now. So the back of the bow is the first like hill you have to conquer in bow making. - I'm sorry, Dan, can we step back to some of the, I know that you've got a video on drying the bows, but I guess what are some ways that you and others use to speed up that drying process? Other than rough, past the rough, once you rough it out and to say like a bow blank shape form, is it with fire? Is it with a dry space or use in a heat box? I know folks are like, put it in the, your cab or your pickup truck in the summer time, can you touch on some of those items? - Yeah, so, yeah, now we're getting into the topic of forest drying, which is like the umbrella that holds all these things like fire hardening, quick drying, all that stuff. So generally when I quick dry, I don't feel the need to forest dry. If you just rough out the stave, now it's going to dry out in a few weeks. - Okay. - At least. Sometimes a couple of weeks. And usually I have enough bows going on, that's not a big deal. If you want to have a bow in a couple of days a week, one day, then you're going to need to forest dry. You can do that with a hot car. Like you don't need conditions that are very hot. So just a really hot car for a couple of days might take care of it. A hot box for a few days. Some bow years build specialty hot boxes for drying their staves faster. I used to have one, but I don't really feel the need anymore to do the fire hardening. So you could heat treat while the wood is still wet. And this works well. It's risky and you have to know what you're doing. So I tend not to recommend it for a general audience. If you know what you're doing, then you'll know if you're well equipped to do this or not. In general, it's pretty easy to burn your bow and mess it up. But if you want to just do an experiment of making a bow in a day, you can rough it out, dry it out of your coals. And it might work out, it might not, but it's a fun experiment to do. Yeah, I agree, I agree. It's nice to do a little R and D and everybody likes fire. - Yeah, the thing is that it is a trade-off, right? So the more you force the drying, the more you're encountering all of these extra problems, you have to juggle. So you can create extra work for yourself, especially if you're dealing with a character bow that has a little bit of twist or has some character notes. Everyone likely to warp. So personally, I tend not to want to force the drying just because that's playing things a little safer. - And when I use wood that's been properly slowed dry, it is a nice luxury 'cause you run into much fewer issues. - Absolutely. Yeah, there's certainly, as you mentioned, for that reduction in time, the amount of time that you have to wait to start using that piece of wood, the longer that time is, typically you're reducing that amount of risk, right? But if you have to speed it or expedite it or force dry it, that increases your risk throughout the building process. - Yeah, yeah. I guess the only thing I forgot to mention about drying is after you split, you want to be sealing the end grain. So any kind of glue, paint, anything that dries hard and seals up the pores, you just want to get some of that on the stave. - It's great. - The other approach is if you don't want to waste wood glue, you can just leave your staves long by a foot on other end and then they'll crack into the ends and you cut that off anyway. So that's the other approach. - I think that's really good. And it's like I'd use just if I have old varnish in a can, if I have, I've got staves underneath the house that have bright pink tips 'cause there were some spray paints sitting around, it was bright pink. And it's just whatever, that's sucked over. That's what I'm done coating the ends with. - Whatever you got. - All it is, it's going to seal that. What about bark removal? Do you recommend storing them with bark removed? - Oh man, this is a whole can of worms. - We're talking about bugs. - Definitely, no, this is a good topic. It's another trade off. So if you leave the bark on, there's the risk of bug damage. So if there are bugs inside the bark, they might eat your wood if you leave it on. Advantage of leaving your bark on is that it's going to slow down the drying. And so you're going to get fewer more, like fewer cracks, less warpage. And the other problem is that sometimes in the summer, if you take the bark off immediately, the back will dry too quickly and you'll get checks all up the back. And it's pretty common in the summer to peel your bark and then the wood dries too quickly and you ruin the back. So leaving the bark on mitigates that risk. But if there are bugs in there, you're going to get the bug damage. So it's about which of those issues you would rather deal with and then you should make a decision based on what's worse in your area. I cut a lot of hickory that has no bugs at all. And so for the most part, when I split hickory, I leave the bark on. But if I see bugs on the inside of the wood, then I take the bark off immediately. - I mean, that's your approach. - I think the more mature trees will typically be more inclined to have bugs, at least from what I've gathered, a larger piece of Osage or Locos or something like that might be more prone to having bugs than three inch saplings. - Yeah. - Now the advice for Osage and for other heartwares is a little bit different. I would say either leave the bark on and drive the wood with the bark on or take off both the bark and the sapwood. So the issue is that if you only take off the bark, then the sapwood could crack. And if the sapwood cracks, then the cracks might carry through to the heartwood. So if you're dealing something, if you're using a kind of wood where you want to use the heartwood, I would say, either leave the bark on or take off both bark and sapwood all the way down to heartwood. - Yeah, that makes sense, so. - Yeah, don't like just take the bark off. Like Locos probably Osage, you and some others to go ahead and follow that protocol. - Yeah, Mulberry, Labernum. - Oh, like, Oak is something where you can treat it as either a heartwood or a sapwood. - Makes sense. - Thanks, man, appreciate it. I think that will save people a lot of heartache when they go to the trouble of harvesting wood. And a year later or something like that, if they've waited that year to dry and get in there and they've got bugs or cracks or something, they're looking for information on how to mitigate those infractions. - Yeah, unfortunately, there's not like a step-by-step list of advice I can give that works 100% of the time. There's risks and you gotta do what you gotta do to manage them. But whatever you do, there's gonna be problems either way. So you have to figure out what goes wrong in your own wood drying shop and what your own local issues are and then play it by year. - Yeah, and it's also like in the environment, right? Like I live in the Southeast and it's human as heck here all the time. Some process might take longer than others, but I think it's good to, as you've mentioned before, even when it's selecting woods, look at woods that were historically used by say indigenous cultures in that area, but also like some of that had to do with environmental circumstances too, right? Those woods were used in that areas 'cause they were probably one prevalent too. Maybe they accommodate that dry or in contrast, humid climate butter too. So these are all good things that you've done a good job at laying out and thanks. - Yeah, there's always wisdom in the historical choices of wood. You should listen to it more than you think. - Yeah, it got put into text for a reason, right? - Right. - All right, should we move on to the back? - Yeah, let's do the back of the bow. So the back is like your first major hurdle when you start making bows. Like everyone is afraid of the bow breaking. So it's the first thing you've got to tame is how do I make the back strong? How do I make sure my bow doesn't break? And the nice thing is that once you understand how the back works, you're gonna pretty much be in control of it. There are a bunch of different ways to make the back and they all kind of relate in one central way, which is this concept that bow years call violation. So the idea of an unviolated bow is one where the fibers on the back go all the way from tip to tip. So the thing about fibers is that fibers are strong in tension. So if you have the fibers spanning all the way, then the whole back of the bow is strong in tension. If you imagine taking a string, if you cut it in the middle, you're gonna lose all your tension strength. So it's important that these fibers on the back of the bow span all the way without being cut in the middle 'cause then they're gonna lose the tension strength. So the more the fibers on the back span all the way, the more unviolated the back is. And that's important to remember 'cause there's all these different ways of approaching the back of the bow. But what they all have is in common is that there are different ways of ending up with an unviolated back. For example, when you chase a growth ring, you're getting the back down to fibers that go all the way from one end to the other. When you use a white wood and you take off the bark, now you're down to unviolated fibers on the back. If you're making a board bow and you're looking through the board pile, you wanna reject the ones that have a violated back and choose the ones where the board was saw in parallel to the fibers 'cause that means the fibers can span all the way along the back. Whatever approach you end up with, whether you send you back, you're adding a backing, the goal is always to end up with an unviolated back. Fiber spanning, tip to tip as much as possible. - I think that's great information. And you've done a lot of good illustrations on your YouTube as well. And we'll collaborate and find those so we can put links of them into the show notes, Dad, because for me, he was a visual learner. As you explained this, I was able to actually, let's be able to picture some of the schematics that you've drawn me for on, but you're like picking out a board bow tutorial, right? And you outline, hey, if the grain looks like this you can see how it was sawed this way or that way. And I think that helps informed folks on how to best piece like either a stave or a board for their first bows. - Yeah, I think it's definitely helpful to look at diagrams for this kind of stuff. But it's also helpful to think about that. For example, when you're picking out a board bow that the end grain orientation there. So you can use quarter sunwood, you can use flat sunwood, you can use anything in between. As long as the board was cut parallel to the fibers in the tree, so those fibers are going all the way across the back without being cut in the middle. So you cut that string in the middle, you lose your attention strength. So if the board is sawing at a diagonal, now you've got a bunch of cut strings on the back of the bow, and you can't trust it in tension anymore. Now you might get away with making a bow out of violated wood, but you won't necessarily be able to trust it. And every wood can handle violation of some degree or another. The main thing when you're getting started is being like super pedantic about that. You want a board that has lines all the way straight from one end to the other. If it's got some waviness or you've got cathedral shapes or you've got anything other than straight fibers, you might make a bow, but you're not going to be able to trust it. And whatever you learn might not carry on to the next bow. So it's important to develop an intuition about how much you can push the wood. And so if you pick on violated wood, if you pick on violated wood every single time, there's going to be consistent behavior. But if you're picking violated wood, then every time you're going to get different behavior and you're never going to really know when the bow is going to break on you. So if you want to develop good intuitions about what the line is, like where the edge of the cliff is, then it's important to be picking good boards. - So when we're talking stays in this case, it's not boards and say a whitewood in contrast to a heartwood with a heartwood, we're following a growth ring, right? And that helps ensure that you're not violating that layer. Well, you did mention that with whitewoods, it's less paramount to follow a ring. How do you know if you're violating that back or not on a whitewood, if you're not necessarily following a growth ring? - Nature has already chased a growth ring for you. All you have to do is take off the bark. Now, if you mess up taking off the bark and you nick the wood, then you'll have messed up. One good way to check to see if you have violated the back is if you can see open pores. So the fibers on the back of the bow, they should be long and straight. Now, if you see the shape of a cut straw, like any kind of conic section shape, then you're probably dealing with a violated back. So look really close. And if you see open pores, that means some fibers have been cut. - Now, what about if you're in a sense of, so some like hickories and pecans, when you take off the bark, some of it's naughty, right? It's got these little elbows or tits to stick out. Do you file those down? Do you keep them? Is it superficial? Or is it something that can be detrimental to nine? What's your two cents? - So here's what I do. I start peeling the very end of the stave, and I go all the way down to wood. And that way I know, okay, here are my layers, and this is how far I can go. And then I do the same thing all the way down the sides. So when you can clearly see on the ends and the sides, how far you can go before you get to wood, it becomes a little bit easier. You don't have to keep guessing. Am I going too deep? Am I going too deep or not? 'Cause you can see exactly how deep you need to go. - But you've got unique pieces of wood that are when you're just going to the sap wood, by some of these, some types of wood, right? Some types of trees will have, it's not butter smooth, right? It's, yeah, I'm thinking of like some hickory that I've got out here that I've taken off the wood and it's got these little, the end of my pinky knots up and down that layer of sap wood. Pardon me, is it like inclined to just keep that? 'Cause I think it's adds really neat character. But is there a need to go ahead and go beyond that sap wood to a different layer to make sure it's nice and smooth, for example? - Oh, definitely not, you don't want to do that. You want to keep it down to one fiber as much as you can. So you're going to have knots, you're going to have interlocking patterns on the back of trees, like especially young hickory trees have a really cool interlocking pattern. And some woods like horn beam and a hop horn beam they have this like muscular sinewy texture on the back. So when you reduce the bark down, you don't want to be cutting deep into the wood. Once you get to the wood, you're done. You want to stop there. So it can be very helpful to have scrapers that have little fine curly points so you can get into those little nooks and crannies. - That makes perfect sense. Thanks for collecting. And even like Osage, right? So a lot of folks have seen these big naughty or twisted or snakey Osage bows, but it can be daunting. And to think, oh, there's a knot in this piece of wood. It's not good, man, it's relatively straight. And you've got the right, you've got good thick rings and things of that nature. Those knots and perceived imperfections can actually just add a lot of beauty and character and not impact the performance of that bow. - Oh yeah, definitely. I'll get to knots in a sec. I just want to say one more thing about the inner bark, especially when you're dealing with hickory when it's got those interlocking ridges, which is that you don't have to get every last bit of the inner bark. You just want to get it thin enough to wear its paper thin. And once it's thin enough that it can bend with your bow, then you're good. If you leave it too thick, it might crack. And that's just going to scare you and then you're going to ruin your finish. So yeah, as long as it's thin enough where it can bend. The main thing with knots is that you want to let the good wood flow around the knot. So deal with knots like they're an island in the middle of a river. And the river is your bow, but the island is not part of the river. So don't treat the knot like it's part of your bow. Let the bow flow around the knot. And later you can get rid of the knot or not, but make sure there's always enough good wood flowing around the knot. And you should be good. - And that's great information. All right. - Man, this is shorter than what I think we forecasted because I got to get back to my real job. But I think we covered the main details for we want for this volume. And I'm looking very much forward to probably three to four more sessions during this series of what we can cover to help lower the barrier to entry for folks to come in and start making their own bows. Before we go, I would love to just one say thanks for all the information and knowledge you can prescribe here. But also for making it seems so approachable. I think coming into something like this can be daunting and come in certainly exciting, but it's like, oh man, where do I start? How do I pick this up? Do I have to invest a lot of money into it? Do I need to do this? Do I need to do that? Actually, you can just dive in and really start with any piece of wood with only a couple of tools and start trying to make a piece of wood shaped like a bow. Also, I know we talked offline about a few projects and videos you've coming out. You've got coming out in the near future. And I guess if you want to highlight a couple of those, the folks know to be on the lookout for some of the upcoming tutorials that you've got coming up. Yeah, so I've got a standing tutorial coming out in a few days. So that should be out by the time this podcast comes out. So that video is about my general approach to finishing and standing bows. And I also stained this one particular bow with mushrooms and flowers that came out with. And I show how I do my two-tone texture on the back. A lot of my bows have a secondary color along the ridges and streaks. So I showed off how to do that. No more trade secrets. I'm excited about it, man. The fact that you do so many natural dies and natural standing methods is always super intriguing to me. Just makes the process seem so much more holistic. And I'm excited to learn from it and then plagiarize the heck out of it from my own bows. Yeah, sometimes the natural stands fade, but sometimes they look great for years. And even when they do fade, though, right? Like, I feel like it just adds more character. It's not completely gone. It's just a different... It adds some rustic age and character to the bows. As long as you like how it looks before you stand it, you like how it looks after, anything in between is gonna look good as the bow fades. That's good. I think it's a good rule. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
On this week’s episode I sit down with Dan Santana to continue our Bowyer in the Making series. During Volume II of the series we discuss bow design and layout, tools, bow woods, making board bows, drying bow wood, and prepping the back of the bow. Stay tuned for Volume III of the series which should publish in mid-December.
Reference Videos:
Quick Drying Bow Wood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZNfGMDLvKg&t=129s&pp=ygUXZGFuIHNhbnRhbmEgYm93cyBkcnlpbmc%3D
Board Bow Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htMTnZiRcHk&t=1225s&pp=ygUVZGFuIHNhbnRhbmEgYm9hcmQgYm93
The Back of the Bow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Soc6zGGqHXk&list=PLi5Xnel2aIJbu4eFn1MvC_w7cGVIPCFwD&index=2&t=1843s
Find Dan on his website, YouTube channel, or the r/Bowyer forum.
www.dansantanabows.com
YouTube.com/DanSantanaBows
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bowyer/
Check out our show sponsors:
Polite But Dangerous Tools- Use discount code “bowyer” to save 10% off orders.
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