Damn it Exploded

I'm rather fed up as the bow was looking really good and wasn't far off full draw. I was studying the tiller flexing it back and forth, I wanted to take it a tad over 45# just to see where it was flexing and how close I was to 28". After all it had been pulled to 50# before.
BANG... Predictably it went at one of the feature knots, but the break/split spread along most of the limb, so it was all rather stressed.

In an effort to learn as much as possible about the break, I sawed through the limb just the grip side of the break, it shows the cross section is good with a nice proportion of sapwood, although there is some blue discolouration in the sapwood and on the heart/sap boundary (see dark streaks where it has split in the bottom pic)

One has to be philosophical. At least it didn't break in the hand at full draw, but it's a little upsetting after the amount of painstaking work I'd put in. That's why character bows are so highly prized, they look good and are rare due to the difficulty of creating them.
On the plus side, the spliced tips didn't break and the grip and lower limb are ok so maybe they can become a novelty Frankenbow at some point spliced onto a longbow limb or something.
I'll have to tell the guy I was making
it for that he won't be getting a bow... mind he's not lost anything, although I'm sure he'll be disappointing.
Dunno what I'll pick up next and when... maybe something simpler!