Monday 17 February 2014

Back Patch and Tip Tidy

I'm doing a repair on a bow. It had some damage to the back, a splinter lifting between two pin knots. While I'm at it I'll tidy up the  tips where the horn nocks are fitted.
The bow is a Yew longbow brought of the internet, its a good workhorse and belongs to the guy for whom I made the Derbyshire Yew 100 pounder.
It grieves me hugely that people taper the tips for horn nocks with all the subtlety of using a pencil sharpener.
I'll tart up the actual horn later on, although it looks less bulbous having tidied up the wood.
I'll let you judge for yourselves. I spent less than 5 minutes with my cabinet rasp (including taking the pics) here are the before and after pics.
It's not just cosmetic of course, the wood removed from the tips will add to the speed of the bow, not a lot, but it all helps. I could probably narrow the tips even further, but this is just a tidy up, rather than trying to 'race tune' the bow.

Here's a few pics of the preparation for the back patch too. The Yew shows some of that discolouration which I've been discussing in some recent posts. The bow has a fair amount of set, but, as I said it's a bit of a workhorse, the Derbyshire Yew bow being saved for 'best'!
The bottom pic shows how I had to make two patches before I got a good fit. All down to attention to detail again.

While I'm moaning about nocks, here's a pic to illustrate how the string groove is ok at brace but no good at full draw. The string will be pulling over a sharp edge while it's at it's greatest tension... not good, again just a few minutes with a file would sort it out!




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