The bow has had a tiny bit of work here and there, mostly near the tips and the 100# mark has now inched back to a whisker over 31".
The curve is looking better, it may have a tiny bit more done about 3/4 of the way down the lower (left) limb, and maybe the first 1/4 but I'll probably leave that until its had some more arrows through it tomorrow, to let it settle.
One of my on-line friends told me that beeswax and vegetable oil (Olive or Canola) in a ratio of 6:1 works well. In the UK Canola is usually called Rape seed oil and I had some of that (a little cheaper than the fancy Olive oil). I cleaned out an old aluminium saucepan that was lying around in the garage (we went over to stainless steel ones a while back, so I had all the old ones for man's stuff) and warmed up some oil with a block of beeswax in it. Pretty soonit dissolved, there seemed to be rather a lot of oil (I'd weighed it out) so I lobbed in another block of beeswax. Once that had dissolved I poured it into a nice old square pickle jar left over from some fancy Christmas pickle. It set to a slightly too hard consistency, it has a nice neutral smell and works as a good lip balm too. Maybe I'll warm the jar in a pan of hot water and add a bit more oil to it. I'm amazed how the beeswax seems to have just soaked up the oil.
It's cheaper than the commercial stuff, but that's not really the point as I don't use a huge amount. The good thing is it allows you to adjust the consistency to suit your needs and it's handy for applying to leather or the 4mm hemp rope I use as a warbow stringer. The rope looks and feel much better for a wipe of wax.
I've just messed about with 'MS Paint' to look at the curve of the bow. It looks like the tiller is somewhat more eliptical than my usual arc of a circle. I think perhaps I was wary of getting it bending in the centre section too much too early. This may help guide how I make any small final tiller djustments as I do like a nice full arc of a circle on a Warbow, although a little elipse is prob a good thing. The centre of the elipse is slightly left of the bow's geometric centre, I'll also take that into account.
That looks great. Somehow I expected a drawn 100# bow to look, well, different. I guess that's silly. You probably just had "elliptical" stuck in your mind.
ReplyDeleteDon
Cheers. Because it is very long and slightly eliptical it does look to be working less than a shorter more circular tillered bow. In the hand the size of it is much more apparent. I should get some pics of it in action today.
ReplyDeleteThat looks damn good.
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