Ozbow

so this is my all bamboo 'horse bow' recurve visual build along

i didn't use power tools, so it was hard work to flatten these as much as possible, a belt sander would have been nice.

i realised halfway through that perhaps my handle was on the wrong side for gluing between the two pieces, so i made the belly into two pieces that butt up against the handle, and added the other small pieces of bamboo to help prevent a break at that point.

i consider this practice for building a horn bow, i found the bamboo an impressively sturdy material, but easy to work

i actually scraped the belly so thin i needed to tiller from the back, the bamboo in tension is thicker overall than the bamboo in compression

the glue lines between these two imperfect surfaces are quite horrible but it works! it's #32 @28 after some set. i think it may go down more with use.

i still need to finish the handle and the tips, but it's working... so i thought i'd share. also i'll take another photo flat on to it to compare the limbs.

For someone that has used no mechanical or electrical tools, I believe you have done a mighty fine job considering. Well done.

Interesting, is the bow of your own design?
With only hand tools at your disposal it would have made the task even more difficult.

It is difficult to pick up detail in the photographs and I was wondering if the bamboo is slightly is concave on the inner surface or did you flatten it.
The rigid handle section could have benefited from fadeouts to get more working limb.
The extreme bends near the mid limb area will most likely result in total failure of the bamboo in that area.

A few more questions;
Are the laminations parallel or tapered?
Did you arrange the back and belly nodes so that fall in between each other or do they line up?
Whatever the outcome some valuable lessons will have been learnt.

I first started playing around with bamboo Asiatic static tip bows in 2006 and the following link started by Archangel has some replies by me on the methods I used to make these bows.

http://www.ozbow.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3714

Daryl.

Thank you very much daryl and bill the limbs are flat for their working surfaces, the tips are still quite rounded on both sides so they do not bend

i'll take a closer up picture of the limbs, they were glued together roughly parallel and then shaved into a taper by eye. i also feel like it should have failed at those big bend points already... i'm surprised that it's still working.
and yes the handle was really a "repair job" in post, but i've now shaved everything down so it looks nice and smooth at the handle, but yes it perhaps prevents just a little bit too much bending.

the nodes were intended to line up, but were not done with precision, they line up very roughly.
this part is hard to explain but...the laminations were not perfectly flat, with say, one left side being thicker than the right, so the lams look either to fat or too thin in some areas, but are glued opposing one another so the thickness is pretty uniform, but my next pictures may reveal this

DrAK DaRippa wrote:....the nodes were intended to line up, but were not done with precision, they line up very roughly....

The nodes need to be stepped in a similar method to the vertical joins in a brick wall.

The photo below illustrates node placement, ideally the node placement on the belly would have been better as indicated by the yellow lines but I had make the best of the bamboo I had left. Stepping the nodes help to minimise hard / soft spots in the limbs.

Daryl.