Gripping Yarns

The spliced Yew bow now has a Mother of Pearl arrow plate a leather grip and a nocking point.
Wow! What a difference a little detail makes!
I'd been shooting it in and the grip was uncomfortable especially with the 70# draw weight and the disparate arrows I'd been shooting, the 5/16" 100gn point arrows are maybe a tad light, the 11/32" 100gn are smoother to shoot. I'd noticed the base of my left thumb was a little tender one evening and it took a while to work out it was the shooting that had caused it.I took a good deal of time to add some leather to the back and round it off nicely before adding the grip. The addition of the arrow plate and nocking point mean I was getting a consistent arrow and hand position. Blimey, what a difference, she's smooth, hard hitting and accurate now, I started clattering the arrows into each other. You can see from the pic that there are two groups, the lower are all 11/32" the main group are the 5/16" with a couple of 11/32"  Bear in mind I was actually "aiming" as such just really shooting the bow in whilst focusing on the square of paper.

The other pics show the leather work and the back of one of the limbs to illustrate my take on following a ring with Yew, you'll see I've generally got it with any ring boundaries running along the bow.

If the weather is ok on Sunday, I'll get to shoot it. Failing that, I'll set up the chrono' and see how fast it is.
I'm really pleased with the bow, it's for a guy who has been after a 70# for a while, one previous attempt exploded on the tiller, and another was ok but full of patches and no faster than the 60# I'd made him a couple of years ago, so I kept it as a demo' bow. I think this one has been worth the wait!