Thursday 25 March 2021

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!

5 comments:

  1. [picture of Chad]
    "Wot, no tickboxes for 'Explain more', 'Interesting', etc..? " ��

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oooh, hand noticed they'd gone... I'll investimigate!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Looks like it's disappeared off even the old posts...
    Obviously another "improvement"

    ReplyDelete
  4. Don't you hate it when "improvements" are made to something that was working perfectly well already?
    (Yes, Microsoft, I'm looking at YOU...)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Yes I agree that is typical, keep on posting Derek, I like following you on your blogspot.
    This project looks very interesting.

    ReplyDelete