Part 3 | DIY BLACK HUNTER Rework

The other day when we were working on this Black Hunter, we refit this, the limbs right here and right here with hand tools that everybody's going to have. And we gave it a little finish coat of spray finish. I'm going to start with the tips on this and do those real quickly. And we're going to clean this up, make this look a lot more streamlined on the tips. You can see here, right here, the transition here is really abrupt. The structural integrity of that really doesn't matter, but it looks like crap. It's just a matter of a few minutes for me to fix that. And we're going to start with this bearing sander here. All right, don't do that. I'm really super, super comfortable with this tool. And what everybody knows in woodworking that that's dangerous when you become really comfortable. So what happens is I get really close in there, and one with one of the abrasives will catch my. Catch my fingernail and pop a little chunk off. That happens. Not a big deal. But it scares you so bad every time it happens. Okay, so that's done. We'll move on. Put our mobile workbench in for stationary. Semi mobile. Call it what you want. It works amazing. You can get to every side of it. We did do this on the bearing sender. However, this can easily be done with a file. So we're going to go ahead and shape this tip. Now we'll start with the backside. If you're doing this on your own, which this video is kind of centered towards, grab you a quick clamp with the rubber. You're going to clamp that down. If you look right here, you can see how uneven these string grooves are. That's an itty bitty one. This one is huge and clear over to the side. It could actually affect tune and tiller. If your string pockets are not symmetrical. First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to just kind of relieve this. Not all the way, just so I can get my rat tail file in there and correct those fade outs on the string pockets. So I'll come in here. I'm just going to relieve a little bit of material here. That's all. Okay, now I can get my rat tail file in. Ooh, that's some pretty wood cocobolo. So I've relieved these shoulders a little bit. We're going to go ahead, straighten out these string grooves. When you're doing this, you kind of want to just start slow and cautiously and get these lined up. Now on this here particular tip it's going to be a little bit difficult to get it perfectly symmetrical like I normally do on my tips, simply because they cut so far in on this here side. So we'll do the best we can here. Line those up parallel those fade outs on the string pocket grooves. That looks good. Now we'll work on floating that down so there's no sharp edges. Nice smooth transition makes for long lasting strings. I don't want to cut too much in on this side. I'm gonna get as close as I can. But whoever was shaping this tip just did not do a great job. Okay, that looks pretty good. File time. Working into the glass, not up. We don't want to blow the glass out. The reason we do that is just to create a smooth radius there so that if you accidentally set your bow down a little bit hard or something, you don't chip the tip. Okay, that looks good. Now we'll go ahead and connect the dots, make this pretty and symmetrical. You can go against this. This is, I believe it's a linen phenolic. It's not going to blow this material off. So it doesn't matter if your file comes off the edge of that and you just want to go side to side. Take a little bit off, go to the other side. Look at it. Take a little bit off and keep shaping it the whole time, making it look great. You can see right there where they cut in real deep. I'm actually not going to file that out. That will come out with sandpaper. If I were to file that, we would end up taking too much off. I'm just looking straight down on this tip now and I'm just making a smooth radius on either side. Okay, that looks good. With the file work, we'll switch over to the 120 paper here. Clean up the file marks, but also shaping as we go. Ooh, toasted maple. We've been toasting our own maple in our ovens to get that rich brown look. Generally maple, it's called torrified. When it's done professionally, you have to do it in a vacuum oven. We do not have that kind of equipment. So we've been experimenting with just toasting it at what temperature we can get the effect we're after. And it actually is working pretty good. In an ideal environment, you want the piece of lumber to have 0% moisture and then an absolute vacuum for your altitude. And that will create the best results when you are torifying maple. Okay, that's looking real good now. It's not entirely uniform yet. I'll do that with the 220. If I sand too much on. On one paper, I could risk running, going too far and changing it. You can see there's kind of a sharp point right there. We're going to take that out with the 220. Taking out the 120 scratches with the 220. This will be finished ready when I'm done with this paper. This gets a little touchy here. When you got to take out sharp point, you kind of have to go back and forth. You can see that I took it out, but now that one's lower. So I'll come back over here and just do just a little bit on that one to make it parallel. Okay, that's looking really nice. You don't have to be this precise if you want to. And it's fun for you. You can. You probably won't even be able to see how parallel they are once the finish is on it. But I like to get them perfect. Now I'll go ahead and sand the top. You can see how that black part widens up instantly when you go ahead and sand that. And that's how it'll look when it's finished, too. So if that line gets a little skinny in the middle when you're in the shaping phase, don't freak out. Okay, that looks really good. So that's the backside done. Not. Not backside, Billy side. Sorry. So we're going to turn around, clamp this down with the backside of the bow facing up. And you see how floppy this is. This. This is not going to work. Just take you a block, cut a little wedge in it, and just put it under there. You don't have to go that far. You don't want to compromise the bow. But immediately, that's solid as a rock and ready to work on. Okay, so on this side, we need to shallow this out just a little bit more so it's not so abrupt. Like I mentioned earlier, we really don't want to fade this because we can't trust the glue that they used. So we'll go ahead and take it off and get down close there. You want to stay off that glass with your file, if you can. Now, I did notice on this here black Hunter longbow, this glass is not painted. On the recurve I did, there was a black layer of finish on top of the limbs. How I know that is when I sanded on it. On the. On the recurve, there was two layers. There was a black layer, and then there was the finish layer. And you could definitively see the differences in the two. And it showed up just a little bit when we were done on this bow. I have noticed there is not that black layer, and I'm not sure what that is. It might be for glass that had some defects in it and they were trying to clean it up or make it look great. Okay, so I've kind of left that edge there. That's as far as I feel comfortable going because I don't know if there's dry pockets under that tip. We did find out on this longbow that the tip is not plastic on the recurve. We did, it was some sort of plastic. I believe this to be a linen micarta of some sort. It smells like micarta machines like micarta. The other stuff would come off. It would almost melt off on the recurve. So little higher quality tip on this black hunter longbow than the black hunter recurve I did. Okay, so I've got that shape. Now I'm going to shape this with a file. I have to be really careful here because on this one, they cut that string pocket incredibly deep. I do not want to remove this at all because then I will compromise the strength of the tip. So I'm going to stay off that inside radius and I'm going to take this down. If you scratch that inside radius, that's not the end of the world. I just don't want to cut a groove in it there. I scratched it a little bit. Not the end of the world. Come right out with sandpaper. You just want to be conscious of not digging a hole in that because that's going to reduce the amount of strength that your tip has. So I'm just floating this back to the point so there's not a big jutting thing there. Also, it's much easier to string when you have a open entry to the string pocket. Okay, now, I don't want to take any off this tip. I'm just. I'm just floating it up to that point, and that's good. All right. So like I was mentioning before, we don't want to take off any material down here in the string pocket because this is already. Oh, there's about an eighth there, which is perfect. So we're just going to clean up these edges, these sharp edges, because no sharp edges on a tip, we cannot have that. That will shorten the life of your string significantly. And even worse, if you have a sharp enough edge, the string could break in mid pull and you could have an injury. I've cleaned up the radius on those. Now I'm going to just round these edges over, make it look great. And do this side staying off that inside radius. Again, we can take anything off. If there's a little bit of an edge there, we can fix that with sandpaper. The file is a lot more aggressive. Use the file to save time. Okay, that's good. That's as far as we need to go. Now we'll move over to the 120 paper with our largest radius. 120 is on. We're just going to clean this up. That shoulder looks pretty good, actually. I didn't have to touch that. I'm going to take out the file marks. Ideally, this tip really needs to be extended just a little bit to look really great. It will not affect the performance whatsoever. If it was extended just a little bit more, it would look in proportion to the rest of the bow. Okay, that's good. Next I'm going to take out the file marks that I put in here. And then I'll also round these edges over to make it look even better. When you have to sand a flat surface along with an edge, always sand your flat surface first. Because if you sand your edges first, then you will create a little ledge here when you go to sand your flat area. And you'll just have to redo the edges. Start with your flat surface. Once I've got the file marks out of that, I'm going to radius this corner here. That's going to make it look a lot better and not as chunky. This smells like linen phenolic kind of. When you're shaping this, it might be some sort of linen phenolic or micarta. That looks like a good pleasing shape. Now you can see this is kind of chunky and it's not very pleasing to the eye. So we're going to take those edges down. Okay. That looks good smelling that. And it doesn't smell like 100% linen Micarta, although it does smell very close. I think there's more plastic in this or something in this. In this tip material. I would be really curious to see exactly what it is. I imagine it's a. It's something they get for pennies on the dollar. Okay, switch over to 220. Take out the 120 scratch. Clean it all up pretty. Making sure these inside radiuses are all smooth right around here. Make sure the shoulder is nice and smooth. I can work on that shoulder just a little bit right now. Just want to make sure there's no burrs or Anything sharp here? A nice smooth, symmetrical shoulder. Okay, now I will go ahead and clean up this slot area. Now, like I was saying, we noticed there's no black finish on this here bow like there was on the recurve. So I can get on that glass a little bit. Once again, I did not fade this out because I'm worried that there's dry pockets in there and it will actually look worse if I find a dry pocket under that tip overlay than if I would just leave it. Okay, now I'm going to give it a once over. Find any scratches? I see a few scratches there. And the last thing I'm going to do is take a piece of double folded, which gives you three wings. And I'm just going to. You can use this because it gives you just a little broader radius. And I'm going to just gently take the sharp point off the end of this bow. That will ensure that if there's an impact on the point that this bow tip does not ship. Okay, that's perfect. So that tip is done and it's ready for finish. We will not touch that tip again with any sort of tool or sandpaper. We're not going to show you the other tip. It just takes too much time. So do the exact same process for the other tip and your golden. Remove this first. We've already fitted this lower limb to the riser, so now we're going to fit this upper limb. We have to be a little bit careful because we don't really want to take off this Black Hunter decal. It's not a big deal. If it's not important to you, take it off. But in order to keep the integrity of this, that's still a Black hunter. I don't really want my name on this bow as a Great Plains bow, so I want to definitely have it branded as a Black hunter. Just reworked by Great Plains. Let's go ahead and go over to the bearing sander and we'll clean up these edges as much as we can. I got to be careful because I don't want to get too close to that Benzel, but I want to take out that Makto's lens. All right, that's as far as I'm going to go on that one. Now we'll go ahead and clean up this other side. As long as I stay on this wedge here, I won't change the tune or tiller of the bow, so I got to be careful about that. Okay, that looks good. We'll take that out just a little bit. Here. Okay, that looks good on that side. Let's do the other side. Okay, that's perfect. I'm gonna stay away from that decal here, and we can clean that up later with different sandpaper. So I've got these two sides mated and this side. This side right here is so close. I'm just gonna do that with the finer pneumatic sleeve. Get my redneck dust collection going. We're going to put 80 grit on there because that 40 grit on that bearing sender leaves some pretty big marks. Now we're just going to clean up those marks. I left being very careful, first of all, not to get on that decal, but also we don't want to dig. It's really easy to dig a hole right here. Go right up to that arrow on that black hunter. And I'm going to stop and do the other side. This side, I don't have to be quite as sticky because I don't have a decal here. Still have to be really careful right here, though. I'm going to float across that. I'm just applying very light pressure to this boat. Okay. That's the only thing we'll do here. These are already really, really smooth. Only takes a couple minutes versus file work. So we'll go back over to the vise and we'll clean these edges up. Yes. Okay. We'll start with the back side of this riser here. Clamp it in your vise like so. That doesn't contact. So I'm going to move this back, give myself a little bit more surface area on the vise. I'm going to use this here pneumatic sleeve. Most people probably won't have these. You can pick them up at Lee Valley Tools if you don't have one. And be conscious of keeping this at a 90 degrees as I'm standing. So on this here, I don't want to come up over the top of this and hit this, because this has already been painted. Now, if you don't trust yourself with tools, I would recommend taping these off so that you didn't damage them. If it looks perfect to your eye on 90 degree, it's going to look perfect to everyone else. As far as just eyeing it in. I could probably put a square on there, but it's really not necessary. Now. I got to float this back out because I kind of dug just a little bit of a hole here. We got to make that look symmetrical. Okay. That looks great. All the scratches are out of it. I believe there might be one there. Okay. Looks great. Now we'll go ahead and flip this. Make sure you're off that wedge. You can crush the. The limcore veneers and wood. If you put the edge of your vise that wedge, you want to. You can get on it just a tiny bit, but you want, you want. When that starts spreading out and rising up, you don't want the edge of that vise here because it's going to put a lot more pressure on that wedge. All right, we're going to come in here, and we're going to mate this right here. Now, if you'll remember, when we made this bow center shot, I purposely stayed off of this edge for a reason. Now, of course, I don't have to stay off of it because I'm actually mating it to the limb, but that's the reason you stay off of it. We didn't want to dig a hole here and then have to take the limb way down. Take a look at that. That looks really nice. Flushed up perfectly and mated. We're going to go ahead and take out the rough scratches here and mate this perfectly here. Again, very important. Do not get onto the limb with your random orbit and keep your random orbit moving. You want to dig a hole in this bow limb. When I get to where the transition starts, I'll use long strokes with light pressure and moving pretty quick and keeping it moving so that I transition where I mated this into where it goes into regular limb. So I don't dig a hole here, but also so I don't dig anything out of the limb. All right, let's take a look at that. So I've still got deep scratches in there. I'm going to switch out paper. Okay, scratches are gone. Let's flip it over and do the other side. So this is much, much easier for me with all my power tools than this side. But really, this just takes more time. It's not like it's hard to do this with hand tools. Okay, here again, staying off that decal. We got to be really careful on this one. Now there's probably going to be just a little transition line on my three piece recurves. This is actually offset and moved out. So there is like about an eighth of eighth of an inch divot here where this swells up on this bow here. It's not going to be a big deal if you do that just a little bit. But that line is not straight. So we kind of want to line that up with the shelf. This is the line I'm talking about here. Now that's kind of up on an angle. And really that doesn't affect anything other than looks. But we would like to have it kind of in line parallel with the shelf. So as I rotate this, you'll see where that line is. It's like that. We kind of want to straighten that out in line with the shelf. It's going to look much better. You won't see it really when it's done. You would have to look for it to notice it when it's done, clamp it back in, staying off the wedge of the limb. All right, let's go for it. Okay. So what I'm going to do something here just to protect this decal just a little bit more. I'm just going to come in here and put it right over that because I can see my paper getting on that and doing some naughty things there. That's gonna work a lot better. One thing about a random orbit. These random orbits on a Makita brand, they will spool up and start spinning. So that thing is spinning really fast this way. If I were to touch it down while it's doing that big problem. It's going to dig a hole immediately. Dewalts don't do that. But I do not like the dewalt random orbits near as well as the Makita. Makita is way better ergonomical handle and it's a way better sender. However, it does have that one floss. You just got to be careful with that when you start a random orbit. You start it, set it down. Okay. Well, I was standing. I decided it would look better to create just a little radius in here. And I think it does look a lot better. Instead of a straight line there that looks like it's supposed to be in there. And that looks cool. You can see the grain kind of follows it. Sometimes I change on the fly. But I like that a lot better than putting a straight line in there. It's all perfectly mated. We just need to do a final sand on it with 220 paper and we're basically ready for finish. We're getting very close to being done with this Black Hunter. The reason we use 220 for this is we're just taking out the swirls that the random orbit put in there in line with the grain. Come up to here. Sand that perfectly so there's no swirls from the random orbits. I never did this when I built cabinets. But with bows it's a lot more picky. So normally I would round this off right now on this here side, But I'm not going to do that because I don't want to scratch that black bushing benzel in there. I am going to do it under here, though. I'm not going to run into anything. And actually I could do it all the way up until I get close to that benzel. Okay, that's good. That's ready for finish right there. Flip it over. We'll do the other flat side and then we'll do the radius. Okay, Looking very, very nice. Now I'm going to do this right here while I have it clamped in this position. Now I'm going to show you how to do this just with a piece of sandpaper because really that works about the best because it's a pretty sharp angle for that other rubber sanding tool. So we'll just come in here. I'm just going to take out the scratches I put in there with that 120. I'm going to look there, see if they're out. Not quite. Okay, that looks great. I'm going to tape that because I could do the thing I've been talking about not doing, and I haven't touched those one bit yet. But really, that's pretty foolhardy to believe that I can not touch them at all. So I'm going to tape that off just so that I don't get on that benzel. Okay, come in here. We've already shaped it. We don't care about shaping it. We're just going to take out all the 120 marks with 220. Normally I would bevel these edges, but we might have enough room. But on this one, I'm not gonna do it. You can do it if you want to, or I come in and actually put a bevel on here and here. It looks really great. I may do it on a future black hunter, but on this one we're just gonna leave it square. But I am rounding this over and you have to do this while the limb is on, because this here needs to match this where you round that edge over. I'm gonna round that over too, and I'm gonna round this over. Stay in line with the grain as much as you can on this, and that's good. Maybe float that out just a little bit. Probably don't need it. That limb is perfectly fit. This limbs fit. The tips are done. The last thing we're gonna do before we spray this thing, we're gonna take the limbs off and we're gonna ease the edges around the benzel because we don't want to scratch that black Benzel. I haven't seen a black hunter where the washers are glued down. Maybe. Maybe more guys have ran into that. I don't really like that. Leaves a lot of residue on there. So I'm going to take that washer off. Use denatured alcohol, because lacquer thinner can take your finish off. So I got most of it off. We'll finish the rest of that over there. But what I wanted to show you here is where this mounts. We're just going to ease this. Actually, you know what? We already did this slim when we did this video before, so we don't have to ease the bottom here, but we do need to ease up around this Benzel. We're just going to ease that. Doesn't take much. Just want to take the sharp edges off. Keep in mind we've already tuned and tillered this bow, so we don't want to do much to the limbs. Whatever that is, it does not come off. And I could leave it, but then you're going to have that white glue coming out from underneath that washer, and that's just not cool. When I work on a bow after I've got everything done, the last thing I do before I spray it is I double check the tune. So let's go. Take it over, string it up, make sure nothing changed. Once in a great while, things can change and you just. You don't want that.