Sunday 15 November 2020

Horn Bow and Character Yew

 It's been a few weeks since I did some fairly severe correction to the horn bow which include heating it whilst clamped up and re-doing some of the sinew. I plucked up courage and strung it agian, it's looking much better but is still slightly biased to one side. Drawing it until I could feel it lift off the lever and letting it down showed it to be much improved, I'll possibly do a smaller but similar correction to the other limb, but I'll shoot it again first to see if it settles. However not much shooting at the moment due to Covid of course. I didn't bother with pics or video as there's no much to show.

In the mean time I worked a Austrian Yew stave from a friend, it was an odd piece with a big waggle at one end where a big branch forked out, it turned out to be rather short at about 69" and ended up tillered to 80# at 28" I expect it would draw further, but the stave was worrisome with some drying cracks, discolouration between hear and sapwood, and of course the character waggles.
I didn't actually do all the finishing on the bow as the guy I made if for was keen to do the finishing, to keep him occupied during lockdown. He's also getting into making strings, which is great for me as I find that a bit of a chore. I did finish one nock and the character waggle just o see what it would look like.
There are loads of videos on my Youtube channel which char the path from log to bow.
Here's the first showing it as a log being reduced to see if I can work round the knot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iat-ReAU-TU 

Here's the last vid showing it virtually finished, although, I did rasp a little more from the stiff areas:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYajjV8VrZQ&t=1s