Maple longbow, made by hand, with hand tools.

Here are the tools I will be using

Sawing out the stave. Probably the most boring part of the process, but it's good exercise!

I refine the roughed out stave my hatchet

I use a block plane to smooth and straighten the sides.

Here's the bow, roughed out.

Using the plane and a spokeshave, I rounded the corners, and floor tillered the bow. This means I exercised the limbs just with my arms, and checked for an even bend, and worked it down until the bow was able to be braced. Here's the first bracing of the bow. If you have keen eyes, you'll see its bending sideways and the limb tips are a bit twisted. I'll fix this by slowly removing wood from the corners of the bow that are too stiff.

lovely grain on this board.

Here's how I exercise the bow in between shaving off wood -- you need to pull it 20 to 30 times each time you make a change, to settle the change into the wood, so you don't pull off too much without noticing. Wood has inertia, it wants to stay how it was before, so we have to persuade it.

Here's the second bracing of the bow. I've fixed some of the lateral bend, but now you can see that the right limb is too stiff, and the left limb is bending too much mid-limb, and not enough in the outer thirds of each limb.

Here's a clearer photo of that problematic string alignment. I caused this by a mistake I made when I laid out and cut out the stave.

Here I've made some improvements to the tiller, and it's drawn to 16 inches.

Drawing the bow in its final tiller, but before heat treating.

Here I've decided to heat-treat the belly of the bow. This means I clamped it down onto my table, as you can see, and I used a heat gun to lightly toast the wood on the side of the bow that faces the shooter. This side of the bow faces compression forces, and by tempering it with heat, we can improve its properties, and also reduce or reverse some of the set (permanent bend, or damaged wood fibers), that occured during tillering.

After heat treat, I put a quick sisal wrap and leather handle on the bow, and it's done. Next, I'll shoot it a few hundred times to settle in, then make any final tiller adjustments, then I'll sand and seal the bow with carnauba and beeswax orange oil finish.

closeup of the handle.

Shooting in my (limited) outdoor space. The final specs of the bow: 66 inches from nock to nock, and around 55 pounds of draw weight at my draw length of 27 inches. Bonus video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikpx8kcmhtA

Thanks for sticking with me to the end. happy to answer any questions.