Splitting logs into staves
As I’ve said before, to start working, I need to get my hands on some bow materials, or bow wood specifically in this instance since I’m planning on making a selfbow.
For that purpose, I have a few ash logs lying by my shed, waiting to be split into bow staves.
As you might imagine, it’s not a very complicated process. Still, you do need a bit of tools. Nothing special, but you won’t get far without a few wedges (I prefer forged iron, though you can get other/fancier materials like different polymers or what not), and a good, heavy sledgehammer. An axe also comes in handy for cutting any wood fiber that remains across your split.
When looking to make bow staves, I believe the best way to go is to follow any natural checking that the wood might already have.
If the log has been sitting and drying for longer then a week or so, it will certainly develop some cracks. If there are several, I try to split along the ones that look most promising and will give me a nice, straight stave without knots and twists.
I have this log that I’ve already split in half sooner, and there’s another crack forming in the right spot to miss a big knot to the left so I decided to run with it.
The first step here is to drive a wedge into the face of the log straight through that crack we’ve chosen.
That will start splitting the log and a lenghtwise crack will also appear. I give it a few more taps to widen that crack and insert another wedge into the log from the top.
Driving the new one in will continue splitting the log and allow me to pull out the first one. Or, in this case, it just fell to the ground on it’s own.
Then I take the first wedge, move it down the log and continue doing that till the log is split.
And that’s it, easy-peasy!
Now, you’ll notice that I’m left with kind of a bad result here. The straight piece I wanted, the one that doesn’t have a knot, tapers off to a point, and the other one is nice and (kinda) uniform in width. This happened because the grain pulled to the right. But there’s not much we can do about that and also keep with the natural path of the wood fibers.
The solution here will be to work with the length of log I have. It’s about two and a half meters long (a bit over 8 feet for my American friends), so I can take of a good half meter off and still have enough usable material. That will allow me to cut off the knot on the bottom end of the thicker stave and also the tip off the other one to leave me with two usable pieces.
So my advice here is to always cut your logs longer, if you have the option to. You never know for sure how the wood will look inside or how it will behave while splitting.
In the end, about an hour and a half and a few cuts later, I had 5 nice staves that I’ll bring inside to dry out. Some of these could probably be split further in half, but I decided against it. Didn’t want to ruin the whole stave by accident.
I still have a couple of smaller logs to go through, so that will give me plenty of material to practice.
Anyhow, that’s all for this post so thanks for reading, and catch you next time!