Best Kind Of Wood To Make A Longbow

Yew is typically regarded as the best wood for making longbows.

Best kind of wood to make a longbow.

The two most commonly used bow woods are pacific yew and osage orange. Elm creates short stout bows with thick limbs. Recurve bows can be made of several different woods including hickory yew osage orange and lemon wood. Pacific yew is extremely strong under compression and sam harper of poor folk bows calls osage the ideal bow wood.

Yew is the only non hardwood that is suitable for creating bows and it is one of the best. The wood must be able to bend without breaking. Ash is a ring porous hardwood and the early growth wood is coarse and stringy with the late growth wood being harder and stronger. The best wood for making a longbow.

Two important characteristics determine the suitability of wood for bow making. Softer woods to avoid would be aspen cottonwood poplar balsa and pine. You can also use wood like hickory white ash green ash black cherry but oak is just fine. However as individual bowyers have their own preferences some choose to make longbows from white oak red oak hickory red elm american elm osage orange or rock maple instead.

Ash is another well known bow wood from history but like wych elm it made a far better broad limbed flat bow than a d section longbow. Stated another way the best bow woods tend to be those that will bend easily and not break. Types of wood for bow making recurve bows. Some woods that are good with raw bamboo backing include osage yew ipe and bamboo because they can withstand the compression forces.

Measuring gluing and cutting this video goes through the main part of taking a 1 x 2 and making it start to look like a bow. Bamboo is very strong in tinsel strength so it needs to be very thin to avoid overpowering the belly wood. In terms of looking at the raw mechanical data of woods the best bow woods tend to be those that have a low moe and a high mor. Longbows are the most common and simplest type of wooden bow.

It makes a great backing to almost any kind of bow. You want the wood you choose for the stave to be no thicker than 2 inches woods that are best used for the stave include maple yew ash or hickory. Yew very popular for centuries throughout europe this lightweight wood is good for simple short lived bows with a light draw weight.