Sunday 3 January 2016

Yew Primitive getting Close to Full Draw

I'd been fighting the string alignment and tried to video some of the problems with trying to see how the string lies. Once a bow is braced it will draw to form a plane of string and bow in an alignment dictated by the bow itself (assuming it is only lightly supported at the grip and allowed to move as it wishes).
Anyhow... I still had an ace up my sleeve.
The guy for whom I'm making the bow had specified he wanted it 66" long... people don't often specify a length, but I was more than happy as 66" is a very good length.
So... guess. How long did I made the bow?
Yup 69" ! Those extra 3" give me some very useful leeway. Cutting some of a limb tip creates a new tip which is a little wider (due to the taper) this gives the chance to remove wood from one side or the other to adjust the string line a bit more. The other good thing is it gave me the chance to play with limb lengths, traditionally the lower limb is shorter than the upper, but I'm not really a great fan of this and I've made some with the lower limb equal or longer than the upper.
On this one I've made them pretty similar. It's actually quite difficult to measure the limb length due to the gentle fade into the grip, especially on this bow where the grip isn't that thick and it's verging on being a bend through the handle design.
Maximising the working limb is something I approve of, I don't much like bows with 6" of unbending grip and another few inches of fade. Of course there are arguments for that sort of design, but it's not very primitive. I like a short grip with the lower bulge of the hand sort of overlapping onto the fade.
Anyhow the bow is beginning to look more elegant, the tips are much slimmer, the string line better, and I've tried to get the pale sapwood showing through where possible.
Despite shortening it by 3" the draw weight is much the same, as I've substantially narrowed the tips and also narrowed the upper limb a tad to match it better to the lower.
The pics show the bow at 26" draw and how the beauty of the wood is beginning to show now I've started using a scraper to take out the rasp marks.
Here's a video talk through showing the progress.

https://youtu.be/WxDG-_N3zNo

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