Thursday 11 August 2016

Osage Flight Bow V Close

I've heat bent some deflex, heating at the fades and improved the curve of the tips, but then the string line was out, I think it had shifted where I'd heated it so near to the grip. Clamping it up carefully and doing another correction has got it back again. The moral is, you can't have too many clamps and you should spend as much time jigging up a bend as actually heating it. I've posted a pic of the clamping arrangement for the tip bend which also took out a little kink from the early tip alignment bend.
Other pic shows unbraced which is looking quite pretty, but note I've gone fairly subtle on the deflex and reflex. The drawn pic is about 65# at 22" so that's damn close. I'm going over it cleaning up, checking the thickness for thick points and rounding the edges, then I'll take it to 24".
I'm not having a cut away arrow pass and shelf, but I may do that later on once I've tried it.

Cleaned it up, borrowed the string from the previous flight bow and tried it with my regular field arrows (5/16" about 400gn). Damn hard to draw it initially until I got the feel, It's like the start of a warbow draw (it interpolates to about 90# at 32" which I can just about manage, and that's why I chose this weight). It's fast but it fractured the arrow... fortunately my son spotted it as I was asking him to video me shooting... lucky escape from arrow embedded into left hand.
So I cut a small shelf to minimise paradox and thus arrow flex, then I tried one of my 11/32" 490grain arrows. V smooth and very hard hitting. It also hit home straight and true, roughly where I was aiming.
BTW. I marked the arrows at 24" with masking tape, as a draw length indicator.

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