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Huh! I have a locally made wood bow made from red oak and it's an absolute bastard to shoot. I think the bowyer wanted to one-up my 55# Samick sage so he made i

Huh! I have a locally made wood bow made from red oak and it's an absolute bastard to shoot. I think the bowyer wanted to one-up my 55# Samick sage so he made it a 56# draw weight. And even with a thick leather armguard it hurts quite a lot to shoot because the brace height is barely over 5" and it doesn't have a trigger grip being a piece of wood. I wonder where red oak ranks on the strain/mass chart. I'm used to hearing about yew being a really good wood for bows, but I'm more into shooting them than making them. I did find this which appears to rank them: https://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/bow-woods/ https://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/bow-woods/ but I don't know which if any of those are Australian.

coderenegade 4y ago
Yeah that page is a decent start. Dividing modulus of rupture by the density of the wood gives you the Joules/kg that the material will take before breaking. Yew is quite good. Osage, lemonwood, black locust, hickory etc. are all very good. Elm works but it's worse than yew. Bamboo should also be very good, but its properties vary widely and aren't really captured on that site. Australian river red gum is theoretically decent, and I know that people have made serviceable bows from it. I think merbau backed with bamboo is about as good as it gets for Aussies, and merbau is an import.
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  > Bamboo should also be very good, but its properties vary widely and aren't really captured on that site. I was watching a video the other day about samurai bows which are made of laminated bamboo. Quite comparable to the English longbow as those things go.