Not much Bow Work

This week I have mostly been building the twin cot which is now finished. The base (6mm MDF which is varnished) lifts out and each end comes off by removing 4 screws. The screws are long and bite lightly into the end grain before meeting a dowel which has been glued into a hole drilled through the rail. They can really tighten into the cross grain of the dowels, which are off cuts from the bars. The legs are a tight fit up into a plate of 3/4" ply, glued in for security. I expect they will have grown out of it before too long, so I haven't gone mad on materials or finish. I've given it a couple of coats of Danish oil which is food and toy safe to BS blah blah blah.

JT came over on Wednesday and he fitted the horn nocks on his Boo/Ipe/Boo stave which he bought from Lee Ankers (Heritage longbows). He rounded off the corners a bit and blended in the tips and gave it another try on the tiller. 110# @ 27" so it's really down to a bit more rounding, tidying, and cleaning up the nodes on the boo backing. It can loose a little width as it gets tidied up. A good amount of the reflex has pulled out of it, which Lee said would happen. It's got about 1 1/2" now where it started with about 2 3/4" . It'll loose a bit more when it comes fully back.
We had a quick look at the scruffy Italian Yew bow I was doing for myself too (on the tiller), the lower limb needs easing off a tad and it'll be pretty much done. It's a shame the sapwood is such a grim colour else it would be a handsome bow. I'm aiming for 80# @29" and I've been doing my 10 pushups night and morning to get the strength back up... mind I've got a tickly cough and feel like I might be spoiling for a cold... could be the wood dust, or the season (it was like this last year). I'll collect all the sympathy and store it in a thimble ;-)

I've also been following a lathe on E-bay... it's a bit bigger than mine, a bit too big for the workshop, but still only 34.5" long, it has a bigger bore through the head stack on decent change wheels for thread turning. I'm only really after it if it's too cheap to ignore, just for the fun of doing it up and probably selling it on. It would be handy though to use it to turn threads onto a chuck back plate for my little lathe so that I could get an independent 4 jaw chuck.... hmm you can see I just want something to fiddle about with!