Next Project

I'm working towards making a tri-lam ELB for a woman who already has a couple of my bows. Laminated bows are something I'm not particularly into but I happen to have the necessary materials.
I've recently bought some more bamboo and my mate Matt from Cambridge longbows gave me a purpleheart lamination some time back.
I'm thinking Yew belly, Purpleheart core Bamboo back.
With a view to improving my Thicknesser/Taperer that I made from an old power plane I've bought some channel section aluminium to make a stiffer adjustable taper sled.
For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about:- A taper sled is like a tapered plank, you clamp or stick a lamination onto it and run the whole thing through a planer/sander etc and it comes out with the lamination tapered to same angle that you set the sled up to. E.G The lamination and sled together come out parallel, thus if the sled was tapered the lamination now has the equal and oposite taper to make the overall pair of  'em parallel. Anyone who still doesn't get it, draw a long thin rectangle with a diagonal line from corner to corner, label the lower portion "sled" and the top portion "lamination"...  you can colour them in too if you like ;-)
I'll post some pics of the tapering sled and thicknesser when it's finished... mind it may be some time as I've a load of shelving to build (so I'm reliably informed ;-) )


Meanwhile back at the story, the woman in question likes her pink arrows and pink fletchings, so I thought I'd make a very "girly" bow and I've experimented with some coloured acrylic for nocks. The acrylic is sold as pen blanks. I quite like the effect but it is deemed not to comply with the rules for longbow which specifies Horn Nocks... that's NFAS and AGB. All a bit silly really as that doesn't allow bone or antler either of which would have been used.
I did a quick try out putting a nock on an off-cut of Yew.
It turns out she wants horn anyway and like how I do my nock at the moment. Still it was a bit of fun and the pen blank only cost a fiver (enough for 3 nocks)