Monday 12 August 2019

Testing My Perseverance

Having a couple of bows explode left me feeling I wanted something quick and easy...
so I picked up the old 3 ring per inch yew warbow that had broke a while back and started to refubish it, aiming to make it about 60# !
The old warbow had broken at the splice and was going to loose a few inches, but with some careful patching in I managed to maximise the remaining length. I rasped away a shallow scoop of sapwood at the splice and glued a long sapwood patch over it for added security.
I left the bow propped up against my shelving to allow time for the glue to cure...
Later I was rummaging around on the stepladder pulling out a little Elder stave to play with when I contrived to knock down an couple of big unseasoned staves from the adjacent top shelf... It made such a row that my wife came out to see if I was ok! It had also knocked the glued up bow to the floor.
Last night I thought I'd see how the glue was and suddenly realised the tip of the bow was missing!!! The logs falling on it had split the top nock clean off at an angle... oh bugger. Fortunately the top limb is the longer one and I can afford to lose maybe an inch. Of course it had split off at an angle losing about 3" so I set to and spliced on a bit of Yew to build up the tip, I did it rather quickly so it would be cured by this morning and on inspection it's not a perfect match... it looks good from one side but the heart/sap boundary doesn't match on the other (it's actually wood from the same log), mind once the horn nock is remade it probably won't show.
If the bow survives I shall call it "Jigsaw"

Here's a vid of the first tentative flexing. I filed a temporary nock in the new limb tip... I'm fed up with doing horn nocks and then having the bow explode!

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d13s5y4jYnM

I decided to steam bend some of the waggly deflex bend out of the bow, and when I dug out the wooden jig I use for clamping up bows... there on top of it was the broken nock!

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