Oneida H250 Bow DIY Blackened Wood Handle

A few months ago, I got an old Oneida Eagle H250 Lever Hunting/Fishing Bow - without a Handle - and restored it.

According to the serial number engraved in the riser, it might actually be from the first production year in 1984. After restoring the bow - see my other Instructable (Oneida Eagle H250 Restoration of a Lever Hunting/Fishing Bow ca. 1984) - I immediately went and tried it out - and loved it!:

It is a compound bow, but it shoots like a mix with a recurve. You can shoot it bare-fingered or with a simple fingertab. Because of the orientation of the lever system it also shoots far smoother than normal compounds. You can also handle it like a recurve bow, without a bow press to change the string, no cables that get in the way, and the unusual lever system - really cool! The Green Arrow used an Oneida Kestrel in the DC Comics TV series.

The only problem came with the winter and freezing fingers.

Of course, it‘s easy to buy an old compatible plastic grip on the Bay for around 30$ plus 50$ Shipping (to Germany), but those are plastic, glue onto the handle, and are not exactly nice, or cheap!

At first the project was a bit daunting, because the riser has curves where the grip goes, that are hard to accommodate for with most materials.

What should I use? Should I take some thermoplastic, like a cutting board from the kitchen, heat it up and fit it hot to the handle? Maybe make a mold using plaster, or silicone? How about fiberglass? Maybe scan and print a grip? Use wood or plastic and a CNC?

Hmm, it got progressively worse and more complex and started invading my dreams at night.

So, lets start over and simplify. And why not just do something useful with the wood scraps in the box beneath my desk to make the handle myself - „quick and dirty“….

It ended up being actually a quite simple and easy project that took (me) only a couple of days during the past ’24 Christmas Holliday.

The goals of this Instructable are therefore:

1. Remember that even small scraps or waste pieces of wood might come in handy.
2. Even seemingly complex shapes can often be broken down to a few simple planar sections, so don‘t be intimidated.
3. Quite often, you don‘t need to buy things (like wood stains), because you might have an alternative already available, if you repurpose things.
4. Blacken wood using household materials

I would have loved to make something spectacular, like taking a solid piece of Mahagony and carving it by hand, inlayed with hammered gold frieze, or so.

But, I found no readily available expensive hardwood bits of the right size and am also a little lazy, so that carving was quickly ruled out. Ok, I don‘t have any gold wire for inlays lying around either….

1. A handle needs to be able to take a bit of beating, as does your hand, so soft woods like pine are not so good, but plywood is much tougher, due to the crossed grain. Most pieces of ply that I found were either too thin, or thick, or soft, or small, so I ended up with a 6 mm leftover of Multiplex birch plywood, as well as an even smaller 3 mm scrap, that might fit my needs.
2. The wooden pieces were assembled using standard wood glue
3. Small clamps
4. The wood needs some shaping, so some files and a belt sander come in really useful.
5. A small piece of 2 mm „Moosgummi“ foam is great for padding and as friction hold.
6. Staining, or colouring the wood might be good and I opted for iron acetate and black tea, a couple of small glass jars and a brush - see Step 3.
7. Finishing the wood in this case was done with some steel wool, sandpaper and a bit of oil.

I thought about doing a 3D-scan of the riser and using CAD to do fancy designs, but quickly came to the conclusion that over-engineering would simply waste a lot of time and the holidays are quite short.

So, I took the riser and a pencil and drew vertical projections of both sides and the profile on the piece of cardboard left from the previous project idea (knife sheath).

With the sketches complete, a few other pieces of thick cardboard were used to figure out the dimensions and their orientation to put together a complete handle - simplification of complex shapes….

The grip should:

1. be as minimalistically simple as possible - the fewest possible pieces
2. protect the timing cables of the bow
3. stay On the riser using friction only - without the glue (used on the original), or even bolts
4. The pieces need to stabilize each other with glue - no bolts, or other support

It turned out, that with six pieces it should be possible to create a stable handle, that should roughly fit and provide material in its thickness to accommodate the curves of the riser.

Cut the wood and make it fit together:

Well, cutting the needed pieces was simply done by laying the cardboard bits from the design phase on the piece of multiplex and drawing around them with a pencil and then cutting them out with a scrollsaw - no magic there.

Getting the pieces to fit to the riser was a bit more of a challenge, because flat wooden parts don’t bend so well.

I decided to start with the curviest piece, i.e. the one that will sit above where the thumb connects to the rest of the hand. Making it fit is a bit tedious, but doable using half-round files. For the straight edges I used my belt sander.

It’s a right handed riser, so the next piece was the one of left side of the riser, which was simply glued to the first with the correct orientation to fit the riser, using the wood glue and a couple of small clamps.

Starting now, a piece of thin foam that would later serve as padding was used as a spacer between riser and wood to preserve enough space.

Next came the front piece, where the ball of the of the thumb pushes against the grip, also simply glued together.

As the right side of the riser is not a simple plane, but has a step and groove for the timing cables, a triangular piece of 3 mm birch ply was glued to the bigger 6 mm piece and then the combo glued together with the other pieces.

The final piece was once again a bit more tedious, due to the crooked connecting angles and the riser‘s curves, but what are files for?

Because there are the crooked angles, the pieces block each other rather well, making the construct quite resistant to external forces, i.e. compression.

The primary result is not exactly nice and quite lumpy and uncomfortable with the hard edges to hold on to - great!

But, I have the belt-sander and the files!

So, sand and file away!

You actually have to be quite careful not to take away too much material too quickly and ruin the whole thing, or make things too thin and breakable….

Basically, just stick the grip onto the riser again and again to see how well your hand fits and slowly sand down all the parts that you don‘t like. Because everyone has a different hand and might hold the bow differently, make it perfect for yours - it didn‘t take long.

Done!

Well, almost. White birch plywood on an otherwise completely black bow did not really appeal all that much to me. So, the next step….

So, how do you stain wood black-ish, or at least dark? Easy:

A - Go buy some wood stain and paint it on - if the stores are open….

B - The alternative with closed stores on Christmas is also quite easy:

Throw it into a swamp and wait a while….

C - If you don‘t have the years to wait for the tannic acids in the bog to do their job, you can accelerate things by taking it into your own hand with what you find in your household:

Steel wool and vinegar, and maybe some black tea.

The theory:

If you put steel wool into a glass with some vinegar, the iron will react with the vinegar to form a clear iron acetate solution and slightly flammable hydrogen, and a few other solid leftovers. The resulting (clear) solution can be filtered to get rid of the black leftover bits, but they will also settle out and don‘t bother anyway.

Brushing the solution onto a piece of wood will let the iron acetate react with the tannins in the wood, which will result in a dark blackish color - theoretically.

If you use oak, walnut, or another darker wood, no problem.

But, if you have a light colored wood with little natural tannins, like birch, you will get a muddy reddish color - yeah!

But not all is lost, because you can easily provide the necessary tannins yourself, by using black tea!

To prepare the iron acetate solution, take a small hand full of fine steel wool and wash it with some dish detergent to get rid of all oils in it. Put it into a small glass jar and add some (concentrated, 25%, or so) vinegar. Place it on a warm heater to accelerate the reaction - the longer the better….

For the tea, put a bag of preferably black tea (the more tannins the better) into another small glass jar, add some hot water and let it steep - the longer, the better….

I was impatient and didn‘t wait long enough and painted the handle quickly with the still very dilute iron acetate, and was quite unhappy with the dried brownish-red result. So I made some tea and painted it on and was much happier and let it dry. Then I applied some more of the slowly more concentrated iron acetate-solution and then some more tea, until I was happy with the result.

Putting water on wood usually results in raising of the surface fibers and a therefore rougher surface when it‘s dry again.

So, when done with the staining, take some fine sandpaper, or some of the left-over steel wool to the handle and smooth the surface to your liking.

I prefer some cutting-board oil as a finish, but varnish also does a fine job in preserving your creation and accentuating the texture of the wood, so do as you like.

Finished!

As mentioned before, I used thin soft „Moosgummi“ foam as a spacer during construction of the handle. When the staining and application of oil was finished, I took a fresh piece of foam and glued it to the inside if the handle. The foam dampens any sounds that might result from wood banging on the metal riser when shooting arrows. It also provides a nice friction fit so that the handle cannot accidentally and embarassingly fall off the bow.

Because I got to decide myself how I like it, the handle fits to my hand and style of holding the bow - I hold it a bit wrong - quite perfectly.

So, I‘m happy with it!

The whole thing was a fun project, easy to do, didn‘t take more than a couple of days and cost me nothing and will probably last at least as long as I will shoot the bow….

I hope this will give you some inspiration for your own projects….

As always: Stay fascinated!