Friday 30 March 2012

Serious Tiller Work

Before really exercising the bow on the tiller I sat out in the sun and carefully cleaned up the back, making sure there were no nasty discontinuities, nicks or such like.
I suddenly found I had some help inspecting the work!
I've since had the bow back to 55# at about 25" from a full brace. Holding it up braced and peering along it showed it looked a tad S shaped, but checking out against a straight edge and peering down it as I let it swing fron the centre of the string revealed just a few points where the sides bulged a bit, these were generally where I'd left a bit extra round knots. A little work with the spokeshave set fine and a rasp/file and it's looking fine. There is the merest hint of curve which just offsets the string a whisker towards the arrow pass, which is fine for a right hander.
There was some discussion on one of the forums about 'Can a longbow be right or left handed'. The sort answer is 'Yes', but not by a very significant amount.
A bow isn't very sensitive to material removed from it's width, especially near the grip, which is nice and thick. That's why you can cut out a 3-4 mm hole and inlay an arrow plate without it exploding.
If you took a perfectly symetrical bow and then rasped off 3mm from the arrow pass, it wouldn't really effect the bow, but the stringline would now appear offset by 3mm towards the arrow pass and the bow would appear to be 'right handed'. If course it could still shoot left handed exactly as it did before you touched it, as there has been no change to that side of the bow. However, it might shoot slightly smoother right handed and be less sensitive to arrow spine (stiffness)
Well that's cleared that up!
I've shot a couple of arrows through the bow from a short draw just to try it. They went straight and true, if a tad slow, but it was from a very cautious short draw.

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