--- title: Nine-Tenths Broken description: Making a traditional wooden bow from an ash sapling image: https://havenwoodwork.com/hubfs/IMG_2435.jpeg --- [Skip to content](https://havenwoodwork.com/nine-tenths-broken#main-content) ![haven-logo](https://havenwoodwork.com/hs-fs/hubfs/haven-logo.png?width=3000&height=3000&name=haven-logo.png)Homepage - [Learn](https://havenwoodwork.com/nine-tenths-broken#blog) - [See](https://havenwoodwork.com/nine-tenths-broken#gallery) - Services - [Buy](https://havenwoodwork.com/nine-tenths-broken#about) [Get Help](https://havenwoodwork.com/havenwoodwork.com) - [Learn](https://havenwoodwork.com/nine-tenths-broken#blog) - [See](https://havenwoodwork.com/nine-tenths-broken#gallery) - Services - [Buy](https://havenwoodwork.com/nine-tenths-broken#about) [Get Help](https://havenwoodwork.com/havenwoodwork.com) ![wooden bow](https://havenwoodwork.com/hs-fs/hubfs/IMG_2435.jpeg?width=4032&height=3024&name=IMG_2435.jpeg) woodwork # Nine-Tenths Broken ![John Becker](https://7528315.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hub/7528315/hubfs/raw_assets/public/mV0_d-cms-elevate-theme_hubspot/elevate/images/avatar-placeholder.jpg?width=48&height=48&name=avatar-placeholder.jpg) John Becker September 15, 2026 ## **Step One:** The wooden bow began with a challenge I took to heart and an image that stuck with me. I was visiting Neill – a good friend who lives on a quiet lake in southern Connecticut. Neill made bows, though not for a living, in the strictest sense. Neill hunts deer by primitive means; a wooden bow and arrows with stone points, all made by hand. As I looked at his handiwork, Neill said that I should make a bow. “It’s easy,” he said. He handed me [The Traditional Bowyer’s Bible (Volume Two)](https://www.amazon.com/Traditional-Bowyers-Bible-Tim-Baker/dp/1728864844/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2RH3CHTM34YZL&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.2rky1QA-jnRay22ZlNDXrfWVeVfzy1B1vs9DMj0P6jTtrOG28wLV5SLNj_bV4kiIM8E42JM2ClSvqqshHrWRHdSAm797CA8Q-crY1yqvCG6-lkBHEJSJQ6GpDyNj6s9v7y9Yu5swUfN7jerC0fsb1KOWVEDLsIArQJIv9jSXK8cMNmrBT0v9Ue5jPVCixauI88VQiKHiht4daKCT3NROJM7az2pE4LREevDmIfdLaJQ.F_xBVMmPwvxkdzBnsErf5VWsqRmb8muK75TaBh0CJEE&dib_tag=se&keywords=traditional+bowyers+bible+volume+2&qid=1789480732&sprefix=traditional+bowyers+bible%2Caps%2C128&sr=8-1) by Jim Hamm. I asked about volume one. “No, volume one is garbage. This one will give you all you need.” ## **Step Two:** I was living with my mother at the time, home after college and working as a logger. I had fallen out of favor with most of my hobbies and decided that making a wooden bow would fill that hollow feeling I used to get when I destroyed more than I created. Most of the The Traditional Bowyer’s Bible went over my head. One image stuck, though: “A drawn bow is a stick nine-tenths broken.” I liked that. This project would be one of precision – not my usual strong suit. Then, in addition, another quote stood as a challenge to much of conventional wisdom. I came across it in the final chapter in which Hamm describes killing his first deer with primitive weapons: “I finally decide the inner compulsion boils down to the challenge involved. There are few wild frontiers left to conquer today, and the only way to face new frontiers, to face new challenges, is through self-imposed limitations. Each of us chooses the degree of challenge through the degree of limitation: compound \[bow\] instead of rifle, recurve instead of compound, hand-made wood bow instead of fiberglass. As Professor Comstock said, ‘wooden bows return us to a time when bows were bows and men were men.’”   ## **Step Three:** I began with an ash log five inches in diameter and nearly six feet tall. I had cut it months before to make into a couple of baseball bats. The wood was sound, dry and unchecked. I split the log into two staves with a maul and wedge. The better of the two would become my bow. I came across an out-of-print Eric Sloane book called An Encyclopedia of Early American Tools. In elegant etchings and sparse, adulatory prose, Sloane describes the tools American colonists used for the tasks of daily life. Of specific interest to me was a drawknife – a two-handled tool with an eight-inch blade pulled toward the user to take shavings off wood. According to Sloane drawknives were used primarily by coopers and carpenters, but were now all but forgotten. My grandfather, dead many years, had known tools well. My father, dead too, would have dug it out for me and helped me sharpen the blade, but the vast collection of old tools in the basement were foreign and painful to look through for my widowed mother and so I had to do the searching. In the piles of rusting tools left by my grandfather I found an old drawknife – its steel now the color of wallet leather.   ## **Step Four:** In principle the making of a wooden bow is simple: make the back of the bow one continual growth ring of wood. With white ash this is particularly easy. In [The Natural History of Trees](https://www.amazon.com/Natural-History-Eastern-Central-America/dp/0395581745?tag=smgglusdsadts-20&ref=&adgrpid=195855867565&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvadid=812897116545&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=6226907495137673333&hvqmt=a&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9189833&hvtargid=kwl-2484167636399&hvext=373966966645&hvcampaign=23946688267&hydadcr=11472_13715434_2514964&mcid=&hvocijid=6226907495137673333--&hvexpln=0&language=en_US), Donald Culross Peattie writes, “Every American boy knows a great deal about white ash wood. He knows the color of its yellowish white sapwood and the pale brown grain of the annual growth layers in it. He knows the weight of white ash not in terms of pounds per cubic feet but by the more immediate and unforgettable sensation of having lifted and swung a piece of it, of standard size….For it is of white ash, and of white ash only, that good baseball bats are made.” As a lacrosse-playing child during the age of metal bats, I found myself in slight disagreement with Mr. Peattie but I approached my bow with patriotic sentimentality for lost knowledge. An old adage of the bowyer, says Jim Hamm, is to “take a piece of wood and cut away everything that doesn’t look like a bow.” I decided to lump this into the category of pseudo-helpful maxims told to people making their first bow that don’t really help them at all – already a deep list. The fact is, though, making a bow is heuristic. One must learn by doing. As children we watch people drive cars all the time, yet all that casual study doesn’t teach us half of what we learn in the first five minutes behind the wheel in a parking lot when we are sixteen. Same with bows. I read the book. I was as prepared as words could make me. The rest I had to learn by doing. White ash is known for its wide growth rings and paucity for what woodworkers call “early” or “spring” wood – the weak and porous section that separates one growth ring from another. With drawknife in hand and patience in mind, I began scraping the bark to find the single growth ring that would be the back of the bow. The journey began with ashen flakes of dry bark sputtering off the drawknife blade to fall in a clumsily circle around my workbench. Next the fibrous inner bark – cinnamon colored – could be peeled off by hand. After an hour of sweaty work, the back of the bow lay uncovered, sweetly smooth and arced like the curve of a jar.   ## **Step Five:** Now the belly. Tapering the two arms gave me an eye-opening lesson in the difficulties of symmetry. I soon conceded that my bow would not be perfect. This admission was vastly empowering. By giving myself the permission to screw up I attached less emotional weight to the final product, and focused more on the process. I filed out a handle, then began thinning the arms. When the bow was still more than an inch thick I could bend it slightly over my shoulders. A round file – called a pipe file – cut notches into each end.   ## **Step Six:** I could not stop thinking about Jim Hamm’s words: “the only way to face new challenges is through self-imposed limitations.” A friend of mine who was a nationally-ranked skier recently made the switch to telemark skiing – downhill skiing with bindings that allowed his heel to move freely, almost like a cross-country skier’s. This new method did not allow my friend to go as fast down the mountain or to perform the same level of tricks. He could also no longer compete in big-name tournaments. I asked him why he made the switch to this more difficult version of his pastime. “I wanted to make the mountain steep again.” The tillering process began once the bow could be bent slightly. A loose string was attached to both ends and the bow was drawn, slowly, so that the bowyer could check the curve of each limb. Stiff spots were sanded down. At each tillering the bow was easier to draw and the limbs bent farther.   ## **Step Seven:** I knew the bow as well as I’ve ever known anything. I spent dozens of hours looking closely at the shape, the curve, the growth rings. Even now I could pick any chunk of white ash out of a pile of other wood and compare it to my first bow. (My bow had a dry fifth year, but grew quickly after that.) Ash shavings, even ash sawdust stand out. *To string the bow: The bowstring should already be measured perfectly*: It is linen, home-spun, and will rest taut, four inches from the handle when strung. *One bow point braced against the ground*: Check. *Lean into the bow, simultaneously bending the upper arm. Slip the second loop of the bow string over the upper notch* I lean against my braced bow – a leap of faith – with Hamm’s words in my ear: “a drawn bow is a stick nine-tenths broken.” Pulling, gathering string, loop over my thumb, my God it’s going to break, pulling harder, another two inches, I’m sure this thing will break, farther, sweat on forehead, knee braced against handle, pulling, closer, almost, knee hurting, pulling, bow bending sharply, farther than ever, pulling, almost, closer, there. I slip the loop of string over the upper notch, release, and stand like Ulysses. I am reminded of setting a rabbit trap, cocking a rifle, standing atop a hill on my bike – the overwhelming feeling of holding the power to release stored energy.   ## **Step Eight:** I returned the book to Neill and we went out shooting in the field near his house. Jim Hamm says that a working bow is the highest purpose for a piece of wood. Without adding metal or glue or nails, wood can be made into a viable and effective tool, which perhaps has had as much importance in human history as anything else. Archaeologists show that bows have been used for 50,000 years and appeared on every continent. In the Connecticut pasture, my first target was not lion, Mongolian, or Saxon, but a half-deflated yellow kickball fifteen yards out. I drew my bow slowly, the smooth shaft of the arrow tickling my left hand. Pulled the linen string to the corner of my mouth, sighted along the arrow shaft, breathed out slowly. The arrow flew, whispered through the fall air, pierced the ball, and the yellow kickball skittered away, arrow flopping over and over, rolling in the afternoon dust as if it were on the plains of Africa.   ## Share this post [mailto:https%3A%2F%2Fhavenwoodwork.com%2Fnine-tenths-broken](mailto:https%3A%2F%2Fhavenwoodwork.com%2Fnine-tenths-broken) ## Keep reading ### [Lessons from The Italian Olive Harvest](https://havenwoodwork.com/lessons-from-the-italian-olive-harvest) # Haven - [Learn](https://havenwoodwork.com/nine-tenths-broken#blog) - [See](https://havenwoodwork.com/nine-tenths-broken#gallery) - Services - [Buy](https://havenwoodwork.com/nine-tenths-broken#about) --- Privacy Policy · Legal · © 2026 Haven. 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