Saturday 19 July 2014

Osage NA at Full Draw

I've put a lot of time in on the bow with several bouts of heat bending to remove some of the dips and swoops. The problem is getting the draw weight down! My friend wants 40# at 26" but I'm struggling to get that low as Osage is tough stuff. Normally one never draws a bow past the target weight, but I had the tiller looking good and thought I'd see how it was at 26" draw, bear in mind the bow is only 56" nock to nock.
The lower limb, left has some good sized knots in it too, one of which has opened into a nice character hole. If you click on the firts pic to enlarge it you will see L L L pencilled on the limb... that 'L' for Leave, as in don't remove any more wood from there, you can also see the rasp marks. Any edged tool will dig in around the knots and could rip out huge gouts of wood, so the rasp is preferred.

You can see from the full draw pic it's actually back at 50#, the bend looks pretty good considering those knots. I'll get in touch with my mate and see if he can take a bit extra poundage. I'm not sure if it will be much of a shooting bow, it's really something to be just a bit different and for him to finish and adorn in appropriate NA style, of course it wants to be shootable, but maybe 45# would do. I'm wary of trying to go too much lower as it's getting rather thin already!
I've just tried the CD test, the full draw shot matches the arc of a circle rather well.

I've since braced it a bit higher and tried it with a linen string. Mind I'm shooting left handed as the string line is biased slightly over to suit a left hander. Tricky trying to shoot left handed. The draw weight is down a little but is prob' about 48# now. Shot one right handed too and it seemed to fly fine.

It's modelled loosely on the Choctaw bow on p52 of the Traditional Bowyer's Bible volume 2. It's somewhat thinner to keep the draw weight down. It is much less symmetrical too due to the knots, dips and swoops. I'll post some more pics tomorrow.



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