Bowmaking Tools: Making a Tillering Stick

As I mentioned yesterday, I am in the process of making my first longbow. There are two really important tools that a budding bowyer needs (well, maybe not needs, but they are certainly helpful). The first o the two tools I made yesterday; it was a bow string board (find the post here). Today, my task was to make a tillering stick.

Now, a tillering stick is really what helps take a piece of wood that looks sort of like a bow and makes it into a bonafide weapon. It helps you get just the right bend in each of the two limbs, and it really helps you make sure that your two limbs are exactly the same.

Surprisingly, exact directions online were somewhat hard to come by, so I just went by the pictures of tillering sticks that I could find.

MATERIALS LIST

• a 3-foot length of a 2 x 3 (I used pine, but a hardwood would be even better)

Well, that's it. The materials list is pretty straight forward. However, the real work is about to come.

STEP 1

Using a pencil, make all the marks of what needs to be cut out. You need a notch in what will be the top of the tillering stick to hold the handle of the bow. I made mine about 1.5" across and 2.5" deep. And I rounded the bottom ever so slightly.

Then, chose a side to be the front. This is the side that will hold the bowstring in place. During the tillering process, you will pull the bowstring a little bit, hold it there, and take off wood from the limbs as needed. Then, you will move it a little further and repeat the wood removal. This will go on until your bow can have a 28" draw (or whatever your drawlength is) with perfectly bending limbs.

Because of the above process, this "front" side of the tillering stick needs to have many notches to hold the string in place and allow you to remove wood. So, the first step is to make a mark every inch along the length of the board.

Now, you could make your cuts into the wood at a 90-degree angle to the side, but that could be a bit dangerous as the string might slip out when you don't want it to. Because of this, I wanted my slots angled. So, I drew on an angled lines that met up with each of the lines already drawn.

To make this a bit easier and to make sure that every line is at exactly the same angle, I made a template out of cardboard to help me draw my lines.

Okay, now that all of your lines are drawn, you are ready to do some cutting.

STEP 2

Cut out the notches. If you have a table saw, it would probably be easiest to use that. However, I do not have a table saw, so I clamped my tillering stick to my workbench and used a circular saw. My circular saw has a guard that is able to be angled, so that helped a lot.

I actually made each slot two-cuts wide. This will give plenty of room for the string.

After cutting all those slots, it is time to remove the wood from the large notch in the top. For this, I used my handsaw. I made a whole bunch of cuts down to the line that I drew and then knocked out the pieces of wood. If you have a better way of doing it, than do it that way.

When you are finished removing all of the wood, it should look like this:

STEP 3

Clean up all those cuts. Use a rasp and sandpaper to make the large top notch all nice and smooth.

Then, using thin strips of sandpaper (about 3/4" wide) sand each of the slots along the length. This will smooth out the edges and help prevent your string from being frayed or worn out.

And now you are done! That is it. You now have two helpful tools in your bowmaking toolbox. One step closer to a real handmade bow!