Fortunately, we live in an area rich in osage. Basically, it grows all over the area. The problem with the osage in this area seems to be that more often than not, the trees just won't cooporate and grow straight enough to provide much in the way of staves for selfbows! In an effort to use as much of the wood that's available on a property, we began looking for alternatives that allow us to use the numerous straight sections of tree that don't quite make the 65" in length needed for a decent selfbow. By using this approach, we can harvest 40" sections of the tree and have them cut in 1/2' slats for handle splicing and back them with various backing materials.
Since this would be our first attempt at making a bamboo backed bow, we used a full length slat on this project, but could have very easily used a handle spliced set of slats.
We won't go into much detail on our several failed attempts at making this type of bow except to say that if you follow Dean's instructions to the letter you have a much better chance at being successful.
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