Heavy Yew Primitive

A mate of mine brought over a shortish but wide Austrian Yew stave, to see if I could make a 85# @30" primitive. I was a tad sceptical due to it being only about 71" long, mind being a wide flat design it should be able to cope. I'm just a bit nervy after the last one blew up!
Anyway, it's back to about 80# @27" already. At one point I was considering laminating some short curved levers to add an couple of inches to each end and to give string lift at about 20" draw, however the bloke I'm doing it for didn't fancy that, so I'll save the idea for a later bow. It'll be a good use for thin Yew off-cuts.

The bow has a very weird dip/bend at one end where it was beginning to fork, it'll be an interesting feature, but it's difficult to slim down without overdoing it and risking failure. The limbs were about 2" wide almost all the way up, a bit like the Meare Heath bow with pin nocks at the ends, but I'll gradually narrow it to a more graceful willow leaf sort of shape.

I've added a V shaped insert at one end where there was a manky ring and not much heart wood, that will just stabilise it a bit when narrowed, give a whisker extra length to make room for a stringer groove and also allow me to form a clean flat surface to glue on a horn tip overlay, which is fairly substantial.

The first 3 videos of the build are on my Youtube chanel "Del Cat" (no adverts on the channel...don't you hate the ads?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoDMj-3lvNM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dXec-d_vcI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhUXpSuNOks


Talking of Youtube, I watched one of my vids on our big flatscreen TV as it's available through Virgin media. It looked pretty good!