Monday 9 August 2010

Work in progress Ash bows

The Meare Heath style bow is ready to put up on the tiller. The guy I'm making it for has a young lad and I found this little Ash bow I'd done ages ago which I'm reworking for him.
It's actually the bow I'm pictured steam bending and roughing out with an axe on my website in the 'Other stuff' section.
I think they'll make a nice pair of bows, the little un draws 14# at 20" and 20 # @ 24", it's always tricky to know how far to take out the draw length on kid's bows.

I had experimented with the little bow and backed it with glass fibres from glass rope (used to seal my gas boiler flue) stuck down with PVA wood glue (Ok you can tell I must've been bored to try that, but it worked quite well in bringing up the poundage. Not recomended however!) I've removed the glass and narrowed the tips.
Here's a pic of it at full draw when it still had the glass backing, you can see I was giving it some serious testing, the right limb was begining to chrysal (compression crack) just right of the handle where a knot goes through the limb, there is a tad too much bend there, I don't know if you can see it. Viewing the curve of a bow is a matter of 'getting your eye in' . There are various tricks to help like taking a picture and drawing curves on the computer, but these generally just confirm what your eye has told you. (I sometimes think that in the modern world we've forgotten how to look).
Of course it's now drawing considerably shorter than that and the limbs have been narrowed from mid point out to the tips, to make them work better.

PS. I finally coiled that old bandsaw blade! Go on, cut a long strip of paper, tape it into a loop and see if you can coil it into 3 concentric loops without any twists! (I bet my big Sis will try it if she reads this!)

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