Basically, I developed the technique from an idea put forward by Robert Elmer in his 1946 book - TARGET ARCHERY - when I was casting about for a method of removing the string follow in many of my collection of old wood bows from before the fibreglass era beginning around 1950.
These old bows often had string follow close to 4 inches and many had varying amounts in individual limbs putting them out of tilller with their mate. They had obviously not been looked after and my guess is that many of them were left braced for very long periods in conditions of relatively high humidity.
I had already found that it was nothing like disastrous to reverse bend a wood bow as the old caution warned. I had been doing it after shooting for decades without problem. I had once gradually reverse bent an ELB into 12 inches of reflex without problem and I came to realise that gentle and moderate reverse bending posed no problem unless there was already some kind of damage to the bow already.
In my technique which you will read about, I have reverse bent very old bows into as much as 8 inches in order to remove their string follow and bring them back to something approaching their nominal draw weight and often this would be exceeded by a considerable margin assisted by the wood having dried out considerably more since they were first made.
The other interesting fact that I have found is that there seems to be no limit to the number of times one can re-apply this technique to tweak or refurbish a bow which has resumed some degree of string follow.
To date, I have not tried it on native Australia woods because presently, I don't have a bow made from a native wood. When I do, I will most certainly apply the technique should it require it.
REMOVING STRING-FOLLOW USING HEAT.pdf- (1.72 MiB) Downloaded 60 times
