Friday 4 February 2011

The Needle Bow

I've nick named the thin Ash bow the 'needle bow' as it's so thin, the draw weight is only about 28 pounds at 26" but it still feels pretty lively and will pull to 28" safely.
I made the string pretty thin with just 6 strands of Dacron (I usually use 8 for bows of about 40 pounds) but it seems I've made it a whisker long and I've had to twist it up a lot to shorten it. I think some of the work I did on the nocks effectively shortened the bow a tad.
Hopefully I won't need to re-make the string, I went for a thin one to keep the string weight down and the arrow speed up. Maybe a fastflite string would help, but I didn't buy any when I last got some supplies in as they only had the latest ludicrously expensive stuff in stock and I didn't want to pay an extra 20% vat so that the PM can spend it employing another 'Communications Director' rather than keeping the price of petrol down.

The bow seems to shoot nicely. Being so thin there is little paradox (that's to say the arrow doesn't need to flex much to get past the side of the bow). A leather grip is needed to fatten it up a bit.
I'll shoot it in a bit before I do any more work and I'll post some pics over the weekend.
The speed seems ok for such a light bow, I think the stiffish tips and thin deep cross section help, it will be interesting to shoot it through the chrono.

No comments:

Post a Comment