Saturday 2 February 2013

Wrong End of the Stick!

The bow is looking really good and is back to 45# at 24"
I'm just scraping and sanding now as the last 2" of draw can leap up on you unawares. I want to shoot it a bit too and let it settle. Then I'll get the horn nocks on.
The guy I'm making it for got in touch, he'd misinterpreted my comment about adding some sapwood onto the back. I meant a mere sliver at the nock to give a little extra wood to work with and to allow a nock be to filed in as a temporary nock without cutting into the back of the actual bow. See the first pic where you can see how the nock is mostly cut into the overlay rather than the parent wood. The whole overlay will get rasped away when the tip is prepared for the horn nock.
You can see the very tip of the overlay has got knocked off, if this had happened to the parent wood it would have been a bit irritating.
The extra sapwood also gives me the option to angle the tip towards the back of the bow if required (see lower tip pic). This is handy if say the tip of the stave has a bit of a deflex dip in the last inch or so. You can see on this one the heart/sap boundary dips a bit at the tip, this doesn't matter as it will all be lost under the horn otherwise it would look slightly naff.
It's good to get the cosmetic details right having spent the time getting a bow tillered right. The sanding, scraping and finishing could be seen as tedious, but tackled a little and often it has it's own reward when the bow is finished. It's also an integral part of inspecting for any imperfections or problem areas.
I couldn't resist giving it a wipe of Danish oil to bring out the colour. The pic bottom right shows the filled knot  (near the top) which has almost disappeared, it also has a dark shadow of a pin knot beneath it. Just below centre is a pin knot, unfilled but stabilised with superglue showing as little more than a black streak. Right at the bottom right is a filled knot which is just above the arrow pass and makes a nice feature. The pic upper right shows the swell of the grip area (upside down!) where you can see the knot near the arrow pass again.

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