Col. Bill Bailey came over to my shop and we built this bow in one day.
ONE-DAY OSAGE SELF BOW
Col. Bill Bailey came over to my shop and we built this bow in one day.
I have been building bows since 1998. Like most archers, I started out using compound bows, but I found traditional archery much more of a challenge. Since I am left-handed, I had difficulty finding bows that suited me, so I began to build bows. I started with fiberglass kits, and I made two or three very nice bows, but I felt that almost anything that I sandwiched between two pieces of fiberglass would shoot well. I wanted to experience the thrill of using actual trees and bamboo and animal sinew and horn to make bows the old fashioned way. I do use modern glues, strings and machines to make these bows, and many of them are perhaps too fancy for mere survival. Nonetheless, they are effective weapons that shoot fast. They are also quiet and easy to shoot. I hope you enjoy looking at them, and if you would like to know more about them, send me an email.
Dan's bows can now be purchased through the site Primitive Pathways.
Click here to be taken to the Dan Spier collection.
Col. Bill Bailey came over to my shop and we built this bow in one day.
This short bow (50 inches) is made from hickory. I stained it a reddish brown to resemble juniper or cedar. It is backed by elk sinew and painted in a Hupa-style pattern. The tips and grip area are decorated with rabbit fur. It pulls 48 pounds at 26 inches.
This is an osage orange bow backed with copperhead skins.
This is a snaky osage takedown bow with copperhead skins on the back. It is 66” long and has buffalo horn tip overlays.
This is a native American saddle quiver made of tanned deerskin painted with earth colors. The lacing and fringe are also deerskin. It contains a 40" long osage self bow that pulls 46 pounds with a double-twisted elk sinew string. The arrows are made from river cane with turkey feather fletching. This entire rig would have been worn by the native horseman as he went to battle or to hunt. The bow could be extracted quickly and strung when swung around into his lap. Then, he would mount one arrow and carry two in his bow hand. This way he could shoot three arrows fairly rapidly.
This bow is 66 inches long and pulls 52 pounds at 28 inches. It is covered with one rattlesnake skin from a large snake. I am really proud of this bow. It shoots very fast and smooth.
This is a bow made from a very crooked piece of osage orange wood. It is then covered with two rattlesnake skins. It is 52 inches long and pulls 48 pounds at 26 inches.
Bows made for exhibition and sale at North Georgia Flintknapping and Primitive Skills gathering in Cartersville, Georgia.
This is a picture of the handle of a bow I am making from osage orange (the yellow wood) and Purpleheart (the purple wood). It has maple highlights in the checkered pattern and the outside overlay.
I built this bow for a man who wanted an easy-shooting bow for his sister. I made the bow from a hickory board and decorated it with bloodwood handle and tips. As you can see, it is only an 18-pound pull at 24" inches, but it has a very fine cast for such a lightweight. I love the shape of this bow--a sort of teardrop profile. I have used this style on quite a few bows lately and I really love it. It is very easy to tiller and performs well.
This type of bow is another of my favorite styles. It is composed of two thin strips of hickory glued together in slight reflex. A handle composed of several different wood types is then glued onto the belly of the bow and tips are added that reflect the handle design. This bow is very fast, light and smooth. Bows of this type were made famous by Mr. Perry in flight shooting contests in Utah.
Yew is a traditional bow wood that was used widely by the English longbowmen. It is a conifer, but it has unusual strength and flexibility that made it a fine material for crafting long-casting arrow launchers. In North America, the yew forests are mostly located in the west coast rain forests of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. This bow is made from British Columbia yew. It pulls 47 pounds at 28 inch draw. The tips are carved from whitetail antler.
Bamboo-backed bamboo bows are one of my specialties. These bows are constructed of bamboo cores backed by a thin layer of exterior bamboo with exposed nodes. When glued into a reflex-deflex design, these bows make very fast, silent, smooth-shooting machines. They are extremely resilient and tough. Here are some of my favorites.