Skill: Bowmaking Part 2

I'm back with an update of my bow. If you haven't been following along, you should check out the previous two bowmaking posts here and here. It's coming along nicely. It actually looks like a bow now that I've trimmed it down to shape.

To get to this point I used the draw knife as much as possible since it can remove a lot of wood quickly. I got into some trouble along the way with the wood splitting and peeling. When this started happening I switched to a rasp as seen below.

This tool makes it pretty hard to make a mistake since it doesn't really allow you to split the wood or dig in like a draw knife. It also takes off less wood at a time of course.

So coming into this post, I basically have the back of the bow complete. Right now I'm working on getting the sides finished. That will leave just one variable, the belly, to remove wood from when I'm tillering the bow. Below you can see a more detailed view of my handle section.

There is more work to be done on it but you can see the sides are looking pretty good. The final thing to do before tillering, besides making a string is to cut some nocks into the tips.

For this, I used some smaller round files not pictured. My next bowmaking post will discuss tillering, which is the process of removing wood from the belly to even out the bend of the limbs.