Tuesday 14 March 2017

The Frankenbow

As Kipling would say we should face triumph and disaster and treat them both the same!

With bow making disaster is inevitable, but it provides opportunity for experiment so I determined to utilise the socket portion of the takedown bow that broke on Sunday (previous post) to produce a novelty bow with an upper limb from a primitive that broke a while back.

First a few words about the takedown, both limbs had survived, it was the male part, the plug that fits into the socket, that had failed. The bamboo on the back had given way at the glue line and broken. This joint had been re-made once before and maybe this weak point was left over from then. The original failure was due to my cutting into the bamboo back where it enters the socket.
The Yew primitive upper limb has been whittled down to form a plug to fit the socket, taking great care to leave the back continuous, this seems to be surving.
I've taken some pics and video showing the work, which are dobtless more interesting than a lengthy explanation.

 I did a video, before the final tiller was finished, I needed to do that to see how it was flexing because the boo backed Yew was a 40# bow but the primitive was a 50#

My target weight for the Frankenbow is 40# at 28 and that's pretty much where it is in the pic on the left. I may do a horn tip overlay on the right limb, and by the time I've scraped and sanded out the tool marks it will be pretty much spot on 40#
Here's the link to the video:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GllmG8FGJ4

4 comments:

  1. That a very cool bow del! Nice to keep things interesting! Cheers- Brendan

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