Wonky Rides Again

Blimey! The much re-built wonky ELB showed up last week with a tiny crack across two pin knots on the back. Originally the bow was warbow length and weight, but it failed at the splice after a good deal of use, I cut it down at the break, re-spliced it and made it into a lower weight ELB, still good for roving. It's good to spot these problems early, as left alone it could have resulted in catastrophic failure... and nobody likes that!

I carefully probed and lifted the crack to see how bad it was and stared to chisel it out with my little ground down needle files. Its hard to chisel it out clean straight and even width, so I ground down a square section warding file to clean it up. A set of warding files from Toolstation are cheap and very handy.
I cut some sapwood from an off-cut of English Yew and shaped it to suit, checking against my profile gauge for a good fit, this was glued in with Cascamite, a G clamp in the centre squeezing it down nicely and then one added at each end, the clamps were cushioned on the belly side of the bow with a block of softwood and a piece of carpet.

It was left over night, cleaned up this morning and tested on the tiller to 28", it all looks good, but will get a thorough test on Sunday.

I've rather lost track of what I've done over the last week!
One of the guys at our rove asked if I could make him a 100# laminate. I wasn't very keen, but then remembered I had some relatively thin (~3/8"?) Yew heartwood billets glued up, and some Lemonwood, so I jumped to it and made a Bamboo/Yew/Lemonwood bow. The yew billets had a bit of a thin patch near the centre, so this was built up with a sliver of Pacific Yew that I had. The patch is just under the bamboo backing and it covers over the Z splice, that's quite handy as it allowed me to actually test the Yew core on the tiller, flexing it slightly. The point of that being to get the core tapered so that the Lemonwood belly can be a reasonable thickness and won't end up being feathered out to nothing at the tips.

It was all glued up on one of my formers that has a hint of reflex at the tips. To be honest I'm not so keen on that look now and probably prefer a hint of back set in the limbs which will give a

more arc of a circle tiller and not the stiff outers that the reflexed tips give. I just like the "full compass"look in a heavy bow.
Any how that bow was shot in/tested and approved last Sunday and I brought it back to complete the finishing, polishing the nocks, burning in the arrow pass and Danish oiling it.