Making bows from boards is fun and effective, but what's even cooler is making a bow from a stave (an unrefined piece of wood split from a log). After I got into bow building last year I knew I had to try making bows from staves, so I went looking for a tree to cut down. Not just any tree will make a good bow. The tree needs to be hardwood, and it needs to be nice and straight. I didn't have access to any of the common bow wood trees (osage, yew, locust, ash, hard maple, oak, etc.) so...

Ever since my brother was a wee boy he wanted a CNC machine. While I was climbing trees, playing tag, and goofing around, he was tinkering with electronics and salvaging parts from old scanners. In fact, he wrote an instructable on how to build a stepper controller from recycled parts 7 years ago when he was just a kid (side note, that thing got over 300 000 hits!). Needless to say, a CNC machine was his childhood dream. Over the years he made a few attempts, which were impressive given the materials he used and the fact that he was...

Here comes another longbow (can you tell I'm addicted?). Given that I'm still a novice bowyer, I'm sticking to fairly simple designs. At the same time, I like to do something different with each bow, so I made this bow 6" shorter than my first two bows, and made the tips and handle fancier. Now that I've done a few bows the process is becoming much more refined. This time I used a jig to cut the tapers, which turned out perfect. I also got a card scraper, which has quickly become one of my favourite tools. It only cost...

Shortly after finishing my first bow (before I even test shot it), I began working on my second bow. For my second bow I decided to keep things simply and use the same layout as the first bow, but do some fancy stuff with the handle and tip overlays. The bow is 72" tip to tip, parallel to a bit less than mid-limb, and has an 8" stiff handle (including fades). It took about an inch and a half of set. I start my board bows out by cutting the limb width tapers with a table saw and then using...

My father and I recently decided that we wanted a router table. Rather than buying a full unit which would be expensive and take up precious shop space, we decided to build an insert that would mount to a table saw. I won't go into the details of the table build (perhaps in another post), but want to share the vacuum mount I made for the table. In order to accommodate the router, an extension had to be made for the table saw fence (the bit needs to be able to go into a slot in the fence). My father...