The bow lifted a splinter on the back. But all is not lost!

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yeoman
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Joined: Mon Mar 08, 2004 1:32 pm
Location: Canberra

The bow lifted a splinter on the back. But all is not lost!

#1 Post by yeoman » Sat May 07, 2016 7:30 am

Good morning,

Following is an account of how sometimes you can recover a bow from what may seem like a failed project. You just have to remember that if you keep your plans flexible, there're a lot of options available to the wood bowyer.

A few weeks ago I glued up a lamination o White Oak (WO) on a board of Spotted Gum (SG). I laid it up straight with no reflex. A story for another time.

My plan was to make a ~50lb pyramid bow from this newly glued stave. So I cut out the thickness, then the width. The next step was to round the corners. This is where my folly started, and for two reasons:
#1 - I used the fine side of my Japanese rasp, which is normally an appropriate tool when performing this task on woods like SG or Ironbark.
#2 - I went against the grain, rasping from tip to grip at one point.
The result was a bit of tear-out. I thought I'd removed all the split with some more careful rasping and carried on.

I never take a bow straight to intended draw weight. I always sneak up on it. So there I was pulling the string down to 30lb and I heard that dreaded tick. A cursory examination showed there was a large splinter at the base of the area that'd suffered the tearout.

My initial thought was to glue it down and carry on. SO I mixed up some EA-40 and clamped it for about a week. Because I didn't have time to get back to it within that time. It looked fairly solid, so I strung it up and got it back on the tiller stick. As I drew the string, I kept a close eye on the glued crack. It was only just visible, but as I drew, the hairline of glue grew in width. Not good. This meant the bow could well blow apart, fairly spectacularly, some time don the track.

For a short while I was pretty bummed. I didn't want the work and resources I'd so far committed to go to waste. Then it struck me: the draw weight is directly proportional to the width of the bow, and this bow is 50 mm wide. If I narrowed the bow, I could remove the problem area altogether and start with essentially a brand new stave.

Here's the glued down splinter. I drew over it with a sharpie as the crack didn't show up clearly in the first photos.

Image

I had a quick measure, and re-drew the width profile. This operation would lose me about 12 mm, which in this case meant potentially 12 lb of draw force. But hey, a lower weight bow is better than no bow, right?

Image

The operation was a success. It's now 39 mm wide at the fade, which compared to the 28 mm wide handle makes it look a little odd, in my mind. It's in the twilight between longbow and flatbow. But it's a bow nonetheless. Here it is, 37 lb at 26". I'm thinking I can push this to 40 lb at 28".

Image

I've no idea why the lower part of the image is blurrier than the rest, but hopefully it's enough to get the picture.

So fellow craftsmen, don't lose heart when something tragic happens, because it only becomes catastrophic when the work becomes a waste.

Dave


Oh, and as an aside, to go from cutting out (the second time) to this point in the tiller was under an hour. Tillering doesn't have to be a slow process.
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Nezwin
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Joined: Wed Jan 15, 2014 7:38 pm
Location: Temora, NSW

Re: The bow lifted a splinter on the back. But all is not lo

#2 Post by Nezwin » Mon May 09, 2016 2:55 pm

Good job on the save, Dave. As you pointed out - a lower poundage bow is better than no bow at all.
yeoman wrote:Tillering doesn't have to be a slow process.
For me, tillering takes as long as my patience runs! Then I tend to move onto a different bow until my interest piques again...

Neil

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