Random Stuff

My old spring scale on the tiller ig is getting a bit battered and it's difficult to read it whilst trying to look at the bow. I've ordered a nice big dial scale which goes up to 200 lb, don't worry I don't want to make bow that heavy! Anyhow I'm waiting for that to arrive before doing the horn nocks on the Yew longbow so I can check I havn't made it over weight it's back to 60# at 27" now and all nicely scraped.
So Roy, if you read this and suddenly think, maybe 55 pounds would be better speak now or forever hold your peace!

The Hazel bow is coming along nicely, I got it back to 40 @28 last night and it's still not a nice hint of recurve, of course I had to fiddle with it and heat a bit more back into the lower limb... I had it set under the heat gun at 220 degrees and then forgot it whilst I watched a documentary about photo reconnaissance in WWII hunting out the V weapon sites. Whoops, it got a bit toasted, but fortunately it's near the tip which is supposed to be a fairly stiff, slight recurve.
That tip has a little feature on it, a small knot visible on back and belly, however when I picked out the bark and dead wood it turned out to be a nice big hole going right through and my nock was mostly hanging onto thin air! This illustrates nicely that the leverage at the nock is so small that you don't need a lot of material.
I want to retain the feature but also want to add a small horn overlay. I also don't want to shorten the limb. There is no obvious way to do all those 3 things at once, maybe I'll experiment with mixing Waterbuffalo horn dust and epoxy and filling the hole, I'll have to do a try out first to see if it looks ok.
I've tried it with fine horn shavings made with my rasp and it looks ok, a few pin holes in the surface and it doesn't buff up. I think I need finer dust so I've been making some with a file and collecting it, not the most exciting job. I'll use that on the bow and post a pic when it's done.