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A few years ago I made a few shootable bows but I've been slacking lately. I used to write long effortposts here on bowbuilding but I'll try to keep it short now or I'll piss away all evening.
In my experience, maple is fine for bow wood so good pick. IIRC, sugar maple has a pith (google it) though which can be ugly or cause problems if the perfect tiller coincides with the pith. They say you want to cure (dry) the wood for a year per inch of thickness to approach the desired ~8% (?) moisture content. Covering ends with glue or wax probably helps with split ends but splits still happen to me so I have to leave the stave long so I have something to remove when removing the split ends.
If you haven't cured the wood thoroughly it'll take more set ("stringfollow") and be weaker and it may nullify the recurving, making you lose the curvy look.
Be careful to get symmetrical recurves or it'll end up lopsided like pic related did for me. It shoots ok-ish but there's insane handvibration because the limbs don't cancel eachother out, one is stronger/returns faster.
Americans can get access to Red oak at the hardware store (which means it'll be dry enough too). Red oak is apparently a reasonable bow-wood so if you get a straightgrained plank of that and cut strips you can laminate that, and laminate the recurve into the limbs from the getgo, avoiding the steambending procedure which can be infuriating. Ideal way to make your own laminationstrips is bandsaw + thickness planer.
