Shooting in the Hazel bow.

I've added the horn nocks and got a proper string on it and shot about 100 arrows from the Hazel bow.
It shoots fast and sweet, there are three barely visible chrysals on the belly but I've taken a bit off further down the limb to de-stress that area and even out the curve.

The bow is rather short for it's width and is working very hard, ideally it would have been an inch or two longer and half an inch wider.
But of course it would be no fun to build another bow just like the one on the left, effectively the optimum design for a Hazel flat bow of 35-40 pound draw weight lies somewhere between the two.
You can see from the pic that it hasn't taken much set compared with the slightly wider and longer un-heat treated bow.










I don't know if you can make out the three tiny chrysals on the second pic, the longest is about 10mm long sloping at an angle across the belly.
These are compression fractures and shouldn't cause a problem, as long as they don't grow in length or number, they indicate that the bow was working too hard in that area, the belly wood normally compresses causing some set in the bow, the crysals are a manifestation of too much compression.
Having adjusted the tiller of the bow and topped up the heat treating I shall keep a close eye on that area whilst shooting another 100 arrows or so.
The guys at the club were pretty impressed with it's speed, it seems pretty good for hitting the left over Haloween targets too, my fave was a pumpkin with a skull mask on it.

I might have struck lucky too, a neighbour was having a huge Leylandii cut down so I went and spoke to the tree surgeon who said he might have some decent Yew coming up. Fingers crossed.