Boo Yew Primitive Full Draw

It's virtually finished now except for some shaping of the grip, polishing nocks etc.
The unbraced shape is reflexted in the full draw with most of the bend appearing to be in the inner deflexed area of the limbs with the reflexed outers uncoiling to near straight.

I took measurements for a force draw curve from 10" - 30" and it was linear.
I've had it to a bit over 30" draw at 47#. I hope to give it a good work out on Sunday, along with the Italian Yew longbow weather permitting.
video of the boo yew here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM8PkzSTJNY

Boo Yew Primitive

I have 2 or  3 bows on my waiting list, but it's a matter of matching the timber to the requirement and also factoring the urgency/enthusiasm etc.
One bow was to be a boo/yew heavy weight roving warbow made from a pair of matched wonky billets for my mate Rob... unfortunately he had an accident fracturing his arm and damaging the nerve. That meant he wasn't going to be shooting heavy bows again, but he's working up to about 45#.
This sort of injury can knock you back a bit, so I've decide to jump to and use the wonky billets to try and make a nice fast boo backed Yew primitive of about 45# at 30" draw which will do nicely for field shooting and with suitable arrows should manage to rove as well.
The billets have some nice natural deflex/reflex which, having trimmed them to length (allowing a bit extra) look even better. Having sawn them to rough taper, cleaned them up with rasp and spokeshave and spliced them it's looking very promising.


The Z splice is short (less than 3"), but this is fine as the back of the bow will be a continuous length of bamboo.The yew belly being in compression doesn't need much of a splice, in fact the billets could probably be butted together and work fine in compression! Obviously one wouldn't risk doing that as a slight mishap whilst stringing the bow could easily flex it slightly the wrong way and break a simple butt joint.
There is over all an inch or so of deflex, but I'll jig it up for gluing on the boo back to pull the tips into maybe an inch of reflex. That's one reason for getting the billets to a reasonably even thickness taper. It means that it can be glued without using a former, I'll simply strap it down at the grip to a length of 2"x2", and


the tips can be blocked up into a bit of reflex relying on the thickness taper to give a smoothly blended curve. A dry run first will be needed, but it's not going to be a big bend, so it should be fine.

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!

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! :-)

Started on a Stave

A while back my mate Rob gave me a roughed out bow that someone had given to him, it's Italian

Yew rather knotty and been roughed out. The original owner probably realised he didn't know what to do with it next. I can see why, as it's been roughed out a bit thin and narrow at one tip and it has a fair bit of twist and is knotty. Rob thought I'd know how to make it into a bow :-) ... I quite like this sort of task as I haven't had to source the wood or agonise about marking it out etc... it is what it is, and my task is to tease it into shape. What appears to be too thin is probably fine, it's just that in proportion the rest of the stave is too thick! The twist is more problematic, but it's a matter of compromise allowing a bit of twist in each direction distributed along the bow. Failing that, steam will take it out. Rob has also made me a couple of arrows with medieval style forged heads... V nice... the big swallow tail head is prob best kept for demo rather than use! I've made him a peak hold needle assembly for his tillering scale, which can be fitted next time he's over.
After some preliminary work I've taken 1 1/4"off one end and 1 1/2 " off t'other, which gives a tiny bit more width at the tips and moves the thin area closer to the tip too.
I've been taking videos of the progress and may cut it all into one video (speeded up in parts) once it's done. My other videos don't really give an idea of the flow of the progress, so it should be fun to do a sort of time lapse vid.
I'm not really sure what I want from this bow, I don't think it's prime warbow or flight bow material, so maybe a bow for me, maybe 80-90 at 29-30" I'll wait until I have a better feel for the wood.
Anyhow... watch this space.

Meanwhile my mate JT came over and gave me hand running that big Walnut log through the bandsaw. It was a bit of a struggle as the wood was V wet. He's got a laminated stave that he bought from Heritage Longbows (glued up with a tapered core and about 2 3/4" of reflex..see pic) to try out, he tapered the tips on the bandsaw, stuck on temporary nocks and we gave it a quick try on the tiller to see how it flexed.
Video here:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-bHCMZoinM&t=4s

The Curious Case of the Heartless Walnut

I went down to the South coast yesterday to visit my Brother and to fell a Walnut tree which he planted from a nut about 30 years ago. This tree has been bearing nuts since it was about 13 years old but it was getting a bit big for the garden as it was overhanging his neighbour's garden despite regular pruning back.
The leaves fall into his garden pond, he normally takes the leaves out quickly enough to prevent any problems, but this year he left it too late and they poisoned the pond killing all his Rudd. That was the straw that broke the camel's back persuading him to take the tree down.
 It's about 13" across at the base, and relatively clean for about 6-7 feet. I wanted to make a bow from it as we had the whole back story of the tree.
My brothers friend Kelvin came over to fell it with a chainsaw and we were flabbergasted to see the wood was white all the way through, there was a faintest hint of pinkish colour near the middle but nothing resembling what we expected.

 I won't be posting it on Facebook because there will be hoards of armchair experts pontificating that it is Ash not walnut or that it lowland walnut or too fast growing or some such. To be honest I don't think anyone will actually know why it is like this, but if anyone has any actual personal experience of felling Walnut I would be interest to see their comments. Bear in mind, we've had mature walnut cut from within 400 yards of this sight which has yielded shotgun stock quality walnut!
Anyhow we split the log with only some success as it ran off one side, but after some more splitting and trimming we ended up with one reflexed piece which should yield 2 staves. I brought it back home on the roof rack and I'll persevere to see what it will do as a bow, treating it much as I would Ash or Hazel. One lesson seemed to be split it from the narrow end, although the next log I split may prove the opposite!

However despite the disappointment of the Walnut there was plenty of compensation in terms of good company, good conversation an Indian meal and a few pints!

By the way, the repair to the grip of the Bamboo backed Yew primitive (see previous post) seems successful, it's been back to 100# @ 29 on the tiller and will, weather permitting, get an outing on Sunday.

Repair re-re-pair

The Boo backed Yew primitive that I made about a year ago for my mate JT showed some nasty cracks in the grip area the other day so I've been working on a repair. There were cracks showing on the side of the grip, these had run down from the riser section which was a piece of small diameter Yew with the central pith showing and a few radial cracks, one of which had opened up severely.

I sawed off the riser section and rasped it down to the belly which is spliced Yew billets. I didn't want to remove too much wood and risk loosing the alignment of the limbs or creating twist in the bow. I investigated the crack by carefully wedging it open, I flooded it with low viscosity superglue and clamped it up in the vice. A new slightly longer and thicker riser section of Walnut was glued on and blended in. I thought that this repair would do the job and after a couple of days to allow the glue to cure thoroughly I put it up on the tiller. Slowly working it back and exercising it, I got it to 28" and ... BANG...

The Walnut riser split! The good news is the the crack didn't run down into the belly, and as it was on the tiller it didn't get drawn further and smashed (this is because it's a controlled pull via 2:1 leverage which can be stopped virtually instantly), so I can try a second repair. It dawned on me a day later that I could check what draw weight it failed at, by looking at the peak hold needle on the scale... it failed at 83# .
I spent a good deal of time deciding on a more solid repair and wondering why the Walnut failed, I think it was just some poor quality Walnut. Speaking to my Brother who has worked with a fair bit of Walnut on shotguns, he reckons it's possibly not Walnut, maybe the table top from which it was made was just some random tropical hardwood which was stained up to look like walnut. The surface of the table was certainly darker than the inner wood.
The plan I came up with is to let in a strip of Bamboo edge on into the Yew core, like a reinforcing I beam, then top it off with a riser of Ash with gain edgewise. To give some idea of scale, the groove was milled out using a 4mm end mill,

I've go the bamboo glued in, and then cleaned off flush. The Ash has been glued on and it's ready for shaping and the testing. The last pic shows the Boo strip ready for gluing in, the Yew is protected with masking tape, The pic shows the profile gauge which allowed me to fit the bamboo to the curved slot... it's curved to avoid too much of an an abrupt discontinuity at each end.
Update:- The repair was successful and the bow has been shot a good deal since.