Knot's Cracks and Features

The Yew bow is now just over 70# at 28" and the tiller is looking good.
I'm cleaning up the back, a laborious task, carefully scraping off the remaining cambium and cleaning out any dead wood and manky stuff from knots. You'll see some of the knots are pretty huge, so I'm pouring a little low viscosity superglue into the crater and flexing the bow to force it into any cracks.
There are some areas on the belly where radial cracks from the central pith are showing, I think these are stable, but worse case they can be rasped out and a belly patch added. With a bow like this it is safest to leave it long and also to make sure it has plenty of shooting in and time to settle a lesson I learned from

'Bonkers Bow' (A search on this blog for 'Bonkers bow' will show all the work on it and what an awful scruffy offcut of Yew can turn into).

Note the tear drop shaped scraper in the second pic down.

I'll press on cleaning up the bow and then get some horn nocks on it. I'll go for black Waterbuffalo horn as it will tie in with the dark of the knot holes.

I've had a bit of a play with the bow, moved the top nock down half an inch and tried a few test shots. Smashed an arrow by using one too stiff, too close to the taget, it struck home at 45 degrees and fractured itself. Backing off to 10 yards with my usual arrows gave a clean true shot (even with the string adjusting toggle on the string!). Looking forward to shooting it with decent nocks and string. On the tiller I had it back at 28" a good few times and even held it for a second or two, it feels safe and sound, but only time will tell.