Whatever Next...Experimental Bamboo Backed Yew Lever Bow?

 Having finished the 2 Walnut bows... what next?

There is always a dilemma It's fun to experiment, but I don't want to waste premium wood on experiments... but then if you don't use decent materials, can you draw sensible conclusions from the experiment? So I've sorted through some of my Yew and found a reasonably decent piece of Yew heartwood that is too short for a normal bow and not wide enough to become a pair of billets. It's got a few knots and it's cut at a slight angle to the centre of the trunk/limb that it came from. What I mean is that the stave is approx rectangle 40x30mm. The central pith is midway along the long side viewed from one and it's at the edge of the long side viewed from t'other end. 

Anyhow, I'm toying with the idea of a heavy (80-90#) bow, deflexed at the grip with rigid narrow levers angled toward the back. I' thinking that some form of string bridges can allow the outer end of the levers to come into play at about 50% draw length. The hard thing with this sort of bow is to avoid it flipping on the tiller, getting it stable and in line and tillering it in the early stages. To avoid some of this I may try to make the levers very deep so they can effectively be inline with the limbs for early tillering and then re-shaped to become more backset later.
This sort of idea is something I've been tinkering with over the years and the closest I've really come is the Hazel primitive with flipped tips a tryout with Monkey Bow and the horn bow project that I took over from another bowyer.

Relatively wide limbs should help stability and resist some twist exerted by the levers, the deflex at the grip and a fairly high brace should also help. I'm thinking, maybe laminate the levers as a sandwich of yew and bamboo in a V cross section. I may build up the riser and cut away the arrow pass, I'm hoping for a fast bow for flight/roving. It won't win any flight competitions though as it would probably have to compete in a recurve class against glass/carbon faced bows

Oddly I've been doing so much more as video on Youtube, but these early stages are more abouts thoughts and ideas than action, so I find the blog is a better tool.
So fear not dear reader... the blog is still alive!

Got the Walnut mk2 Finished.

 It shoots nicely, it took a bit of fiddling and fettling to adjust the arrow pass to give clean flight with my standard arrows. I took some video of me shooting it, had to do the vid' 4 times in total as the first two attempts cropped 1/2" off the top limb... 3rd attempt was too far away with loads of dead space. Got it right eventually but could really feel it on my shoulders.... it's only 50#, but that the result of lockdown!
It certainly looks handsome.
link to the video here:-video

Update:- just tested it through the chrono 177fps with a regular arrow 186 with a 27" test flight arrow. That's about what I expected, it would be interesting to try it with a 28" flight arrow, but I don't want to risk it with one of my decent ones, as they may possibly smash when they hit the backstop (an old duvet rolled up in a bag hanging up in front of the back stop netting) 

Walnut Bow Is a right Pain!

 It's been driving me to distraction, even slight changes seem to make the tiller shift from one limb stiff to the other limb stiff and back and forth. I've take it slow steady and methodical, I think one problem has been that any heat treating has allowed the bow to try and return to its original shape.
Anyhow it's virtually there now, but even just taking out the tool marks with the scraper on each limb seemed to cause a bit of shift... I'm almost dreading putting on the horn nock overlays.
I've been videoing it as I've done the work and made a Youtube playlist... it dawned on me it's rather long, but then it need patience to make a bow so a bit of patience may be needed to watch the process!
Can't seem to get anything right on this bow! I cut the nock grooves in the wrong nocks... grr... I had

enough bulk on one to re-shape it, but had to re-do the top nock to accommodate a stringer groove.