Watch: Making a Survival Bow With Only a Knife

In this video, we see Survival Lilly making a bow with a knife as her only real tool. Oh sure, she uses a hunk of wood as a mallet, but the knife is what does the work.

Here’s what she has to say about it:

In this episode I am building a survival bow with a knife. The stave is harvested from fresh green hazelnut wood. It is quite soft and bends well. I cut away too much wood of one of the limbs at the very beginning so I had to cut off the limb, turn it around and glue the bow together. The bow had around 30 pounds draw weight at first but it gradually lost strength with every shot and at the end of the video it maybe only had 15 pounds. But that doesn’t matter because if you unstring the bow and shoot it the next day, it gets stronger again. I am very proud of this bow. It is a quick solution for hunting in a survival situation and can definitely take down small game like squirrels or hare.

She does the gluing with pine pitch, which she had previously prepared. Some heating, smearing, and mashing-together gets that done. Reinforce the ends with some spruce-root cordage, and it certainly turned out stronger than I expected.

She can shoot it pretty well, too. Nice job, Lilly!

Russ Chastain

Editor & Contributing Writer Russ Chastain is a lifelong hunter and shooter who has spent his life learning about hunting, shooting, guns, ammunition, gunsmithing, reloading, and bullet casting. He started toting his own gun in the woods at age nine and he's pursued deer with rifles since 1982, so his hunting knowledge has been growing for more than three and a half decades. His desire and ability to share this knowledge with others has also grown, and Russ has been professionally writing and editing original hunting & shooting content since 1998. Russ Chastain has a passion for sharing accurate, honest, interesting hunting & shooting knowledge and stories with people of all skill levels.