A Good Day

A chap came over this morning to collect the MkII Maple, he brought me over a handsome Ash log as a present which I split once he'd left. I gave him on of my seasoned bits of Hazel to have a go with.
We tried out all my bows and I could see him slowly getting his eye in as he hadn't shot for ages.
One of us shot from outside the garage door whilst the other was inside safely tucked out the way behind some racking.
Now some folk would throw up their hands in horror crying 'health and safety' but we only had 3 arrows in use so we both knew what was going on. The standing area was perfectly safe and out of the line of shot, my backstop net was also there to avoid any misses or rebounds.
Anyhow the point of all this is that you get a totally different perspective on the flight and power of an arrow when it flies about 4' past you at over 100mph. You can't really see it but you hear it's hissing flight through the air and the smack as it thuds into the target.
We gave the Chinese repeater and the primitive crossbow a go too, great fun.

After the visit I got back to work on the glued up billets for the long draw bow, I marked it out using a sting line for the centre line, then  ~30mm wide at the grip running parallel for about a foot either side of the grip, then tapering to 20mm. Then roughed I it out square on the bandsaw to width, and finally reduced the sapwood to remove the darker stuff and the excess.
As I carefully sawed off the excess width it revealed a knot buried in the wood, fortunately there is still a bit of sapwood over it, and it may well disappear off the side of the bow as it is reduced in size. It's near the tip anyway which isn't a highly stressed area. I may fill it with a peg before proceeding to help avoid splitting the wood there.
Other than that it's looking good, the two billets match up to give a hint of reflex and the odd coloured sapwood is less evident now the excess has been removed.
The next task is to go over the back with drawknife and spokeshave getting the sapwood to an even thickness and a consistent growth ring where practical. Then the serious work begins getting it to an even thickness taper ready for the tiller.