Limbcracker is spot on! Do you have a bandsaw, file and/or rasp, block plane/Sureform plane, and sharp knife (drawknife, hunting knife, or cabinet scraper) available to you? If so, I can give you a really easy tutorial (perhaps as a build-along) for a cheap and simple pyramid board bow (board made from dimensional lumber rather than a stave). I use the design for the bow building classes that are a part of the outdoors course I teach at an urban high school. The total cost for the bow, not including string material, is about $8-$10. I purchase my board s from a host of places, including Menards, Home Depot, and a specialty lumber store here in town.
Aside from glueing up the riser (which needs to sit for 24 hours), I can literally crank out a bow of this design in about an hour to and hour-and-a-half. That includes tillering, cutting the string nocks, profiling the handle, staining and finishing the bow with a moisture resistant coating, wrapping the grip/installing the arrow shelf, and making/setting up the string. The bows my first-time students make consistently shoot an arrow average speeds or better (100 feet per second + draw weight) and show mild to medium set after several hundred shots. Yet the design allows for a very light-in-the-hand bow that has negligible to no hand shock and is very accurate, even for city kids with no experience!
I've hunted turkey with this type of bow for the last few years and have been thrilled with it. It's quiet, repels moisture, and is simple. In short, it kills a turkey as dead as any other bow in the turkey woods
Below is a picture of a recent one I made. It showed considerably more set and string follow than I wanted (I stored the board against my basement wall where it picked up moisture...not a good idea.) To help offset that a little bit, I glued on some blocks of wood from the original bow blank onto the tip of each limb and profiled them into what resembled reflexed tips. The speed picked back up to just above average for this bow (which is 63" nock to nock and pulls 43# at 26".) It is stained with blackberry and blueberry juice diluted in denatured alcohol with a couple drops of permanent black calligrapher's ink. This type of stain dries nearly instantly. I then sealed it with three coats of spray-on lacquer (which also dries to the touch in minutes.) I follow that up with one coat of mink oil, which can be touched up anytime the sky threatens rain. Anyway, let me know if you'd be interested in building a bow like this and I'll get you the necessary information.
Topic: Where do I start ? (Read 596 times)
