Great Plains Bow Shop Tour | Full Version

Today I'm going to give a shop tour to Abby. She is our videographer, Josh's wife, which we really appreciate. This is the shop. This is the Great Plains Bow Company shop. Pretty small shop, but we got a jam packed full of tools. Lots of stuff in here. Someday we'll add on. But we're just going to start over here with the raw lumber and just kind of work our way through it. Here's a whole bunch of bows that I'm working through. I'll have these all done in two or three days. Mostly recurves here. There's a couple urgent longbows I got to get out. Here's our raw wood lumber rack. And doesn't take a lot of wood to build bows. So we got a lot of different blocks and blanks here. This is cocobolo. Here's zebra wood. There's some Honduras curly mango. Lots of different species in here. There's actually. Even though it looks kind of like a small amount, there's a lot of money tied up in that right there. Here's some king wood, one of my favorites. Osage orange, cedar, black and white ebony. Some buckeye burl. That's some really gorgeous stuff. That's our lumber rack. And when we start with a bow, we come over here first with the work order.

No, don't. Don't put me on camera. Pause, pause, pause.

Oh, he can edit it out. I say a lot of goofy stuff and he just edits it out. See?

Okay, perfect. Is that bamboo?

Yeah. So that's giant moso bamboo. And we get it in 10 foot poles. That comes right off the container ship out of the. I believe it's Lakeland, Florida. We cut it down, we cut it in sections, we split it, we mill it, and it goes into our limb veneers. Really great stuff. A lot of people think that they use tonkin cane in bows, but it's actually giant Moses. Pretty much everything that's in bows is giant moso. Once we have our work order, Nick is usually the guy that cuts up the wood and he gets the work order. And then he's going to cut up the pieces and glue them together. But there's our joiner table saw. We get the raw lumber. Then after we got our rough shapes cut up, we're gonna come over here. This is our template table. Tons and tons of templates. We need to build more racks for them. We know what they all are, even though they're jumbled. But, you know, we start with our basic shapes. Like this, for instance. Here is the grip section of the SR Swift three piece. So we need that piece of raw lumber. So once we have that, we draw that on that shape onto the lumber. And then we use these grinding jigs. Here, let me show you. I'll grab the one for that one. It's right here. This is the SR Swift grinding jig. This is how we get our tight glue lines. And you can see that template fits right in the jig. So then once we have the raw piece of wood in there, it comes over to the bearing sander. And there's a bearing on this machine. This is a very integral part of Great plains. This is 40 grit paper. It's a 6 by 48 belt. This bearing runs on this here rub collar, rub plate on the jig. So that piece of wood clamps in there like this and then it machines that perfect glue line.

Wow.

Right around that. And so you can see we have tons and tons of bearing sander jigs for all the different series that we have here at Great Plains. We don't even have enough jigs. There's some bows that we freehand them. But the vast majority, the glue lines are done with bearing sender jigs. When we get some time, we're gonna build some more. So after that step is done, we're off to the glue up table. And that's over here where Nick's laying out stuff. You can see he's putting risers together here. And once he gets that all, he'll put some laminations and he'll put those in there. And that will be, of course, clamped together and it will go into our oven. This is just paper that we dispose of every time we're done gluing. He's got some long longbow risers. These are for 68 inch longbows. This is the cap piece for the 68 inch longbow. Here's his cut list that he's making that he's working on now. And here's a couple risers he's got done. He wraps them in plastic so that the moisture release is controlled. And we don't get checks and cracks after it's glued up. We're very careful on that. We have to be very particular with this exotic wood. You can see this riser is cocobolo and it's got a mosaic lamination through it. But we keep those wrapped so that we don't lose the moisture right away. Here's his cart that he's working on. He's got his laminations cut here for the bows he's gluing up, got them all labeled different risers. There's a big pile of longbow risers right there. That's kind of where we, where we glue them up. We roll the glue on, roll the smooth on, on with a 2 inch roller, foam roller. And after we get it clamped up, I'll show you where we go into the oven here. We have, we have four different ovens here at Great Plains. None of them are very, very technical. This is our most used oven here. And it's just heat bulbs we've got, we always have wood drying in it. This bulb is burned out. But when the springtime and summer comes, we only need four bulbs because it will hit. I've seen it hit 200 degrees with five bulbs and that's way too hot. You can see I've got a lot of different woods drying. Most of these are burled woods and stuff that, you know, needs to dry slowly. We found that you can dry it slowly. It will really be more stable and it won't check and split as easy. So most of our stuff goes in there on the risers. After the risers are glued up, we will go over here and we start on the laminations. This is our lamination grinder right here. This is a 16 by 48 open ended, wide belt awesome machine right here. All of our laminations are ground down and we use these blocks here. These are taper blocks for our tapered cores. We run these through the lamination grinder. And this is tapered. This particular one is tapered 2,000ths of an inch per lineal inch. So as it runs through it tapers that 2000ths of an inch. So at 20 inches from the end or the butt of the veneer, you're going to be 40,000ths less than you will out here. And we actually measure, we mic them right here with the micrometer at 20 inches down. Measure, how do you say it? Measure, measure, measure. I never even thought about that. So then after those are ground and we've got the riser glued up, we head back over here. This is our layout table. Honestly, it's kind of a catch all right now. But when we're gluing up bows, we kind of clean it off just real quickly. I'm not going to show you numbers here. This is our formula book. So this is just for the, a model, the traditional longbow. These are the different lengths and the different riser lengths. And then what it calls for, we, we modify this as we, as we need to as time goes on. But if I was going to build a 50 pound, 66 inch longbow, I need 300,000, two tapers. I'm not going to say what the tapers are, but two pieces of 50. 50 glass. So then this is a whole formula book. I don't know what this thing is worth. Probably a couple hundred thousand right here. But bad thing is we don't have copies of this. And that's really, really stupid. We need to get. We need to get a master copy of that right here. This is a. This is a heat strip. This is where we lap joint all of our veneers right here. And this thing gets really, really hot and we make a lap joint on our veneers. And then this clamps down under these blocks and it's really fast and glues those lap joints together so it's perfect fit when it goes into our one piece bows and, and our two piece bows like the lineal tapers and all that stuff. I don't know what you're. They're not gonna. They're. Yeah. Not everybody knows what a lineal taper is. Nick's about to make a. Nick, did you raise your hand? No. Okay. All right. You want to try again, bud? Nick, nobody knows what a lineal taper is.

Nope, I sure do. Nick, don't. No judgment.

Did you raise your hand again?

He didn't raise his hand that time.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Abby said you didn't raise your hand again.

Poor Nick.

All right, so after we lay it out, the bow goes to right here. We roll the glue on and then it goes into the forms. These are our most popular forms that we build right now. We have at least a time and a half this many. Also. These aren't any of our three pieces. Our three pieces are all under there. Once it goes into the form, this machine is hooked up to these stainless steel strips. And every 18 seconds, 1 second of current is sent through DC. Current is sent through this strip with a thermostat and a timer. Keeps this at 160 degrees for an hour. And that's how we heat our bows in the form smooth on. Epoxy does not reach full tensile elongation until it has been heated. It will cure all the way, but it won't reach full strength. These here pressure tubes here, they are actually 2 inch fire hose. They have a max capacity of 400 psi. From what I understand, I'm not a firefighter. We only run them up to 100 psi at the max. Usually it's less than that on different Types of bows on our recurves, we do run 100 psi. A lot of guys don't run that high a pressure. Every bow company is different on that, I would imagine.

And that's to help with the epoxy.

Yeah, that's the actual clamp that puts the pressure onto the bow and it's like a gigantic clip. But it's really uniform, so it covers. If there's any inconsistency in that particular bow or anything, that air hose will just follow that contour and put even pressure down. After they come out of here, the bows will come over here and they get cleaned up on this flat sander here. This is actually just an edge sander turned flat. We never use edge sanders here. Very important machine for the bow company. We use this thing a lot on almost every bow. So bows will get cleaned up. Then Nick tips them out. He will glue tips onto them. That's just back over to the glue up table. Pretty self explanatory machine. The tips glue them on, clamp them on, and then after he's done with that, then I take over and I start my process, which will come over here real quick. When I get the bows, I clean up the tips on the flat sander, the bearing sander, and then I come over to my main station over here. We don't want to talk about this a lot, but Nick's stations are usually cleaner than mine. It could be that he doesn't work as hard as me, or it could be he's just a cleaner guy than me. I guess we just don't know on that one. I use a lot of different tools here. Right now I'm shaping the tip, the belly portion of the tips of this here B model. One piece recurve. This is all done by freehand. We don't have any CNC machinery. I'll show you one that's done and you can see I've got the string groove cut into it and I've got the belly all shaped real pretty. These have to be symmetrical clean lines. Can't have any sharp points here, which that'll be done later. But anyway, I do the tips here. After the tips are done, it's time to do the shelves. You can see on this ambidextrous bow, I've got this rough shaped out for the shelves. I do that, you know, I cut it out with the band saw, draw it out, take it to the disc sender over here. This disc sander is where I rough shape the shelves and it puts out a lot of dust. So it has its own dust collector, little dust collector down there. Because if it doesn't, it'll get in your eyes. So I cut this, modified this so I can get in tight and that's where I shape the shelves. The rough shape of the shelf on the longbows, only on the recurves, I rough shape them on my knife grinders. Nick doesn't like this machine because it's a, it's a hair grabber. So this is a slower, slower knife grinder that we use to train on. And I do use it for some steps. Anyway, after the shelves are done, I will carve the risers and I'll carve them on the bearing sander again. I'll just freehand that bow and carve the riser on the 4 inch side and then the inch and a quarter side using both sides. All of our handles and profile shapes and everything is freehand carved on this machine. After the grips are carved, we take them to the pneumatics over here. These are pneumatic sleeve sanders. Very, very integral to the bow company. Very valuable. We will sand all the 40 grit lines out of the bows on the different shapes and sizes and speeds. This is a really, really fast one. This one here is slower. These are not that dangerous. Now if you had long hair, they would be like Nick. Then after I've got that, it's time to tune the bow. I strip the tape off, write a label on it. This is where I tune everything. This is my tuning tree. This is where I string my bow up. This is the same stringing mechanism that we sell on our tow hitch stringer on the website. And we have a lot of, we call this Sander Alley. Right through here we've got, you know, there's three senders here, two right there, disc sander, three knife grinders, flat sander. And this is where the bows get tuned right here. So after they're tuned, I test shoot them, make sure that they're perfect. Then it's off to edge sanding, which I just head back over to my workbench, which I already showed you. I shape the overlays over there. I edge sand them and after they're really pretty, bring them back over here and we do the final tune. The final tune is to check that nothing changed while we edge sanded them and shaped the overlays. And after the final tune is fulfilled and they're perfectly tuned, then I put one last really fine sand on the glass surface to accept finish with 340 grit paper on that pneumatic just like two or three passes on each side. All that is is to scuff up the glass to accept the finish that's going to be put on it. And then I run the risers over that smaller, slower pneumatic at 180 grit, give it one final buff and then it's off to this machine here where we put the medallions in. So we put this plate on here. This is an end mill. Clamp that in the, in the vise. And then these 3/4 inch Forstner serrated bits go in here, drills the hole for the, for the medallion and then the medallion is installed. And then we'll go to the finish room. I'll show you the medallion and some finished bows. This is a red river gray Swift one piece. You can see the medallion I was just talking about. This is the spray booth here. And this one is ready to go to the customer. This one doesn't have a leather grip on it and so it won't get anything on it. So it is ready to go except we got to put the side plate and rest on. These bows are all finished sprayed here. So they're ready to be leather wrapped. This is where we spray. We use an HVLP in the mornings. We have to put cardboard over here because you have to have the light, the light about perfect to get your contrast when you're spraying. Or you'll get orange peel overspray drips. This is our big industrial fan and we actually create an air tunnel. We close those two doors open that window back there and it's just like a big air tunnel. It just sucks everything out when we spray. Have not replaced this yet. It's getting pretty clogged up. We just go in and clean it. But I imagine at some point the motor will burn up because I'm closing off the airports. But it doesn't run for extended periods so it doesn't ever get hot enough. After that's all done and the bows are sprayed, they got the finish coat on. Then they come back in here. They get fitted for leather. This is where crisp fits them for leather. The buckskin gets sewed on them here and then they get packaged up into tubes and boxes and go off to make somebody's day very happy. Oh, forgot one. One spot our arrow building station. We do custom tune arrows to a lot of customers bows. We don't keep a lot of stuff in stock, but we, we always have enough to fulfill what our customer needs. These are all of our fletching bins. Our different colors of fletchings here. We've got extras up there when they're too full. Inserts, field points. These are our bear shafts, all the different spines. And right here is where we cut them. This is our arrow saw right here. And this is our little half round turntable. We can do six at a time, which we found is for one guy doing them. It's about perfect. You start here. By the time you get over here, you can start again. The glue will be dry enough and so you can just keep rotating around. Kind of fits together like that. That's our arrow station. We don't put a lot of time into it because we're. We're mostly bowers here. If we have arrows going out, we box those up, go with the bow. Let me show you our boxes real quick. They're really cool. These are our boxes. Got the great plainsbow.com website on there, our logos on there. Got a red stag on there. And you can see little smatterings of my hobbies throughout here that I should get rid of. Hockey and airplanes and all kinds of ridiculous stuff. Usually at any given time, we probably have anywhere from 60 to $80,000 worth of bows in the building. We do have a very, very complete line of traditional bows, probably almost more than any bow company out there. Which isn't entirely saying a whole lot. Because when you have so many series, you can become really inefficient if you're trying to build all the series at one time. You have to really focus and be self disciplined and build just longbows for a month and just recurves for a month or you will be just chasing your tail all over the shop. That's pretty much it. That's the tour basically from start to finish. Hopefully that gives a little insight of what happens as we build a bow for all you guys.