Interesting Week

I'm pretty active on line and keep an eye on Archery Interchange, it's mostly about target archery predominantly Olympic recurve and compounds, but I watch out for newbies so that I can point them towards field archery and wooden bows, I also look out for people interested in making bows. A bowyer popped up on there who I hadn't seen online for years, he was selling off some of his bows and stuff... including a part finished horn/sinew bow, Adam Karpowicz's book (Ottoman Turkish bows manufacture and design) which is no longer in print, a pair of water-buffalo horns, some horn tips, and sinew. As you can imagine I jumped at it, he only wanted £50 plus postage (£16), but when it arrived I was so impressed I offered £100. We settled on £80 which satisfied us both. I think he was pleased that the materials would be used and the project hopefully finished. I'd actually already bought the book in electronic format for my kindle, but it is almost unreadable like that, it's the sort of book you need to dip into over months if not years to slowly absorb the information. The whole project is something that can't be rushed, and I'm not picking it up immediately... It'll grab my attention when the time is right.

My mate JT came over yesterday with a bow that he/we had made back in May 2018 It hadn't been shot for ages and when he strung it, the nocks looked about 45 degrees on the skew and it was trying to bend sideways! At first glace I thought maybe easing off one side would help, but once we put it against a straight edge we could see about 2 1/2" of sideways bend. I think we'd had to correct a sideways bend when it was first made, and maybe that had been done with steam and had slowly crept back. So, we jigged it up and gave it a good dose of dry heat with the hot air gun and a light basting of cooking oil, once it had relaxed and could easily pull across we continued the heat to lightly brown the wood and hopefully harden the correction in place. We also applied a little twist correction to help get the nocks realigned. After a lunch break we removed the clamp and there was very little spring back.
When it was on the tiller we could see the upper limb (the one with a big knot was a bit too strong compared to the lower limb, so we eased it off somewhat by rasping some of one edge of the belly from the edge on the opposite side to the sideways bend... e.g. it will tend to bend towards the weaker side, so you ease off the opposite side.

Mean while I've also done more to the scruffy Italian Yew stave and settled on 80# @ 29" as a target draw weight/length). I've started back on the 10 push ups night and morning to regain a bit of fitness too. The horn nocks are fitted now and it still needs a bit more work, it is currently at about 80# @ 26"

I'm also working to make a twin cot for my new grand daughters. It's a long thin cot so they can go in head to head, rather than the more usual side by side double cot... it's just more convenient for the size and shape of their room. I'm just making it of kiln dried pine as they will doubtless out grow it fairly quickly. I'll make sure it's all nicely rounded and sanded and I'll finish it with Danish Oil which is "food safe" (I'll double check this), as they will doubtless start gumming on it at some point! :-)