not the bane of a Bowyer's life but they don't have to be let's take a look at some of the ways you can deal with them that will hopefully give you a bit more confidence in working with wood that has knots with the stave cut out I'm now roughing out stage and can start identifying knots and pins these smaller marks are what we refer to as pins they are slightly smaller than knots and can quite often be removed during the roughing out stage as these ones appear on the corner and are nowhere near the center of the state they are likely to be removed I'm going to mark them and mark the area where I'm going to be removing wood during roughing act as opposed to this knot which is very definitely going to be staying so I'm Martin the area of wood I'm going to leave around it sadly is these pins aren't on the corner of the stave they're unlikely to be removed during the roughing out stage also being on the centerline of the bow where least wood is removed during making of the bow I'm going to have to work around in the same as I will be with knots they also may go right the way through to the back of the state meaning they'd never disappear here's that corner pin that I've earmarked for removal and the knot that I'm going to leave in place let's have a go with the spokeshave and see what happens thankfully the pin has disappeared but as you can see the way the wood has grown around that pin means that the wood is starting to pick up using the tool that I'm using so I'm going to stop using the spokeshave now and I'll move on to other tools to work on that area an almost identical situation here in another part of the boat here you can see the pin from the top going at the side of the boat meaning it should be removable it also has a knot in the same place which I will have to leave in this knot is simply too big and not near enough to the corner to be removed so I'm going to mark rang dit leaving enough area to strengthen it and do the roughing out with the spoke shade either side of that mark so I've pretty much finished marking everything up and removing any pins that I think are going to be removed during the roughing out process so why are we doing all this well let's take a look at this quick diagram and I'll try and explain knots are essentially a weak point in the material once we get the bow onto the tiller and start bending the limbs any weak point could obviously break so to try and prevent that to try and prevent the amount of bending that the bow does at the point of the knot we leave an extra amount of wood around it now in a bow that's free from knots normally the way the limbs taper in this case on this photo on the right hand side the handle section tapering down to the left hand side of the photo where the knocks will be as you can see from these lines this is the normal angle of taper that we would approximately be looking for but because of the knots because of the extra wood we've left around to strengthen those knots we obviously end up with something that looks a little bit more like this as you can see this means we end up with a much larger area of wood that is dense and much more uneven we really only want the area not to be raised and not this sort of mountain slope drifting out from either side of the knot from the extra area would be left so we need to tighten that up what we're working towards is something looking a little bit more like this so the central areas in between the knots are now continuing that nice tapering line from the handle down to the nock and the only areas that are different to the rest of the bow the only areas that protrude are the say centimeter or so around the knot that we've left making it much easier for us to tiller making the bow Bend a lot more evenly so now we know what we're aiming for let's continue roughing out bow in between the knots and around the knots using the spoke Jade first as I mentioned before you can be quite difficult to work with them at all like a spokeshave because he can pick up all ye big lumps of the material from suddenly come out at one and there with gouges or pits in the you if you're not confident using a spoke so particularly what what I'm doing here I'm going in between the knots and obviously trying to leave material where we've marked you may want to move on to what I'm going to show you later on using rasps etc having gone as far as I want to with the spokeshave this is what we've ended up with I'm going to now move on to using the rasp so much the same process as before we're going to be removing everything except what we ring-fenced with the pencil mark around the knot using both hands and slower careful movements with the rasp when you get near the novel near the mark we've put on you will eventually end up with a lip as the rest of the bow starts reducing in height which will naturally give you a bit of a barrier for the rasp so you'll be you'll be hitting the area that you've left rather than going over the top of it this makes working around the knots that much easier so have a bit of patience at first and it will get that much easier a quick look at the other limb here which has a lot more of the side knots which the process is exactly the same and also the central pin area one of the useful things about you is its prominent growth rings we can use these as an indicator to see how evenly we've tapered the limbs going from the handle section down to the nock section but because of the extra material we've left around where the knots and pins are these growth rings as you can see I'm indicating here in pencil tend to spread out from either side of it so we need to reduce the length of those and get them a bit tighter to the north zooming in and using a scraper it should give you a better look at the growth rings but as I'm still in the roughing out stage and to speed things up a bit I'm going to use a brass try and get down to one nice growth ring using the scraper you can see I've reduced the number of growth rings and also their length the length that they protrude from the extra amount of material wheat left around the knot that pretty much brings us to the end of the roughing out stage I'm reluctant to remove any more wood until I've got the bow on the tiller and I can start to really see what sort of shape I'm getting and where I really need to remove more wood and that obviously brings us to the end of this video I hope that you find it useful if there's something I've missed out something we don't understand please get in touch we'll try and help you out and as always please like and subscribe thanks so much for watching and obviously keep an eye out for part two of this video you