I've been crafting a longbow from ash and am about ready for tillering. By tillering I mean: stringing the bow loosely and drawing the bowstring back little by little to give the bow some flex, making finer adjustments and removing a little bit of wood on the bow to get a desirable flex of bow limbs.
I understand that folks tend to use some kind of tillering device to do this. Here's an example of a tillering tree (or a tillering stick with a base):
I don't have a tillering tree (a simple wooden device to hold the bow and hook the drawn bowstring into notches at different levels of draw-back) and am wondering if & how I can tiller the bow without the use of a tillering tree, or nails and pullies in an actually tree?
I'm looking for instructions and/or diagrams detailing how one can tiller a bow themselves, without much but the woodworking tools for crafting the bow. For example, making a survival bow in the wild, how would one tiller it? Maybe the answer is 'bushcraft a one-time-use tillering stick' - I'm wondering if there's an alternative.
(I probably will try to get a hold of a tillering tree or will make something as it's useful to have, but I'm wondering how this could be done without an additional wooden tool.)