Laminating Advice Sought

[awshucks]

I have a friend that has a well seasoned osage orange fence post about 4"X4"X 8' long. He has asked my advice on building a few stick bows out of it. My first impression is to cut slabs on a table saw and glue them together, but what do I know, I'm an xbower,lol. I was kind of hoping you guys would share your expertise on how thick to slice the slabs, what kind of glue to use and what dimensions might come up w/ about a 25 # bow for an 8 yr old I want to introduce to trad shooting. Maybe laminated is not truely trad, don't know and don't mean to insult the discipline, just looking for some advice. Tia.

[Dnk]

I think you should make a phone call to some place like this and get the appropriate information. http://www.3riversarchery.com/Index.asp
I may be wrong because I know nothing about bow building but you can either make a laminated bow or a selfbow if the log is big enough. You also might want to slice the end of the log to show the end grain with a ruler against it to show the size of ring growth. You may find this interesting. http://www.huntingnet.com/forum/tm.aspx?m=2770248

ORIGINAL: awshucks

I have a friend that has a well seasoned osage orange fence post about 4"X4"X 8' long. He has asked my advice on building a few stick bows out of it. My first impression is to cut slabs on a table saw and glue them together, but what do I know, I'm an xbower,lol. I was kind of hoping you guys would share your expertise on how thick to slice the slabs, what kind of glue to use and what dimensions might come up w/ about a 25 # bow for an 8 yr old I want to introduce to trad shooting. Maybe laminated is not truely trad, don't know and don't mean to insult the discipline, just looking for some advice. Tia.

I have been doing alot of reading on osage lately, and will be building my first selfbow in a month. And it sounds like one has to be careful not to start a bow out of wood too seasoned. Sounds like 12% is ideal.

But if he is going to be building a glass laminated bow, then the osage is basically for looks.

[awshucks]

Thanks for the advice, turned into a fiasco. Don't know what kind of wood he had, other than a twisted, warped, knotty, chuck of maybe knife handles, lol. Sure wasn't osage orange which they call "bodarc" here.