Bow Making Basics for Wilderness Survival

Learn to craft your own bow out of locally harvested materials. We cover how to hew wood with simple blades and knives for wilderness survival and more.

Bow Making Basics

Our bow making basics course helps you develop the art of tillering. Tillering is crafting the bow stave down to the symmetrical bend of a bow. Tillering is where you and the wood decide how fast and far your tool and weapon launches arrows.

Shooting Form

We also train with expert instructors at our indoor range to develop the basics of form and focus in archery. You experience a variety of bows such as laminate, take down and traditional longbow.

Local Origins

This is not a class where we use power tools to fashion the perfect bow out of the perfect stave split from exotic trees. This is a practical course with practical blade tools that you may likely possess in a wilderness living situation. We begin with a branch size stave of locally harvested wood. Our focus is learning to craft bows that can be useful in a true outdoor survival setting. Through this you build the foundations necessary to cultivate a true understanding of advanced bow making techniques.

Other schools' bow making classes Their Class We recognize the inherent flaws in many bow making courses. Instead of first learning to work with locally found materials they use exotic wood purchased from a dealer. Then the instructor initially shapes the stave on a band saw. All that's left for the student to do is a little tillering. Unfortunately the staves are frequently removed from the hands of the participants for the instructor to fix mistakes. We believe this quest for unrealistic perfection does not necessarily create an environment conducive to learning a living art such as bow making.

VS

Trackers bow making basics Our Class Learning means failing, succeeding, then failing and succeeding again. We keep it real with locally harvested staves of hazel and vine maple. We know practice makes perfect. If you finish one bow your first day, we put you on another stave to explore the unique flex, bend and features of another wood. We work with realistic staves, wood with knots and imperfections. Let us be clear, we are not here to simply give you the perfect bow made mostly by our instructors. We teach you how to craft a useful tool from local materials, deepening your personal bow making skills and connection to the land.

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