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yew holmegaard--full draw pics--tru-oil finish
radius:
josh, u'll get it the second i get it!
maybe my roomie will take the pics...
Josh:
Awesome. Can't wait to see the finished bow. Great buildalong Radius!
radius:
well, i'm glad you think so...i don't know if i'm really imparting much, just sharing my experience. Last night i glued on tip overlays. I was going to try some elm, because its colour looked so good in relationship to the sapwood on the back of the handle. But it was just too coarse-grained...i think it must be a ring-porous wood...i rejected it and went with rosewood.
The overlays were just barely wider (like 1/32) than the tips, so i had to be super careful about alignment during glue up. I used a strip of tape to start, then a small spring clamp at the very end. When that was good, i put a 2nd spring clamp at the other end of the overlay. Then starting from the center, i added the c clamps and set the spring clamps aside.
the knots and their cracks
To take the tips down i used my drawknife, then rasp, then 4in1 rasp, then scraper and finally i put sandpaper under the overlay and sanded the tip to suit. I "mostly" got it.
Later on I'll make those tips look as cool as i can, and clean up the handle. Soon it will be ready for final sand.
A couple issues: cracks in the big knots. I'm not sure what to do. One of them is at the bottom tip: it doesn't get stressed and shouldn't much matter. But the other one is at the big knot just out of the lower limb fades. It is a "working" crack right now: when the bow is drawn, the crack closes up, and it releases a little when the bow is let off. I guess i'll dribble in the superglue like they say.
A side note:
I bought the vise last weekend from a guy who also had a cool scraper/burnisher/sharpener set. A steal of good veritas tools for 50 bucks...only i didn't have 50 on me after buying the vise, and he was running out the door to go island hopping.
I went back last night and picked up the kit. It has a # of scrapers of different thicknesses and widths, a scraper holder, variable burnisher, chisel jig, and a honing compound. The sharpening stones are 400, 800, and 1000. This guy was serious. He was once a piano tech and repairman, and when he found out i'm making bows, he ran inside and came back with a little stack of ivory strips, about 1/16 thick, 3/4 wide, and 2 " long. He told me to soak them in warm water to make them pliable. So for this special bow and this buildalong, i'm going to inlay an ivory arrow pass. That will be the next step after reshaping the tips.
radius:
First of all, never mind what i said about the ivory inlay. haha. But I am going to do some inlay on this bow, and i've got lots of pics of the process. And i did find some good uses for the ivory after all.
Okay: the focus of today's work on this bow was twofold: shape the tips, and inlay a strike plate.
First i did the tips, since the big ugly clubs were hanging off the ends. The two roughed-out overlay pieces have been sitting in my junk box since last year, as a solid block carved into a crude wedge. I used the hobby bandsaw to slice up the halfway line and then cut the two pieces out.
Today, i drew a line from 1/4 down the back of the tips toward the belly, bisecting where the yew and rosewood met up.
Right after this cut, without the pin nocks cut in, they looked like this.
But my first attempt at the string groove was lame and so it looked like this.
So i fixed the suckers and now they look like this.
But then i thought, I've been concerned about tip mass the whole time, now the things look huge (even if they do look cool)...so i covered the belly portion with my scraper.
And then drew lines and cut them with a drawknife, scraper, and file. You'll see that in these photos, one of the tips still needs work at the belly transition.
NOW, THE INLAY
I don't really know how to do this, so i just make it up as i go. I'll show ya what i did.
Here is the piece of rosewood that i used to make some inlay options. It is about 3/32 thick and 1 1/16 wide.
I used the edge of the gooseneck scraper to draw the arc. I made two options: 1 was arced to the center, the other was arced to about a third of the width. I hope that makes sense.
I chose the one which arcs off center.
But it turned out to be a little wide.
Perfect.
But...big gap.
I put the inlay in here, and heated it with the gun.
Then, i clamped it onto the side of the bow, and heated it further. Scorched the bow a bit, but that's ok. While i had the thing cooling down in the clamps, i marked its position with a RAZOR knife. Not a pencil. In fact i did more than mark it: i cut into the handle all the way around it, starting at the corners and pulling the knife in the "field".
When i removed the clamps, the inlay had kept the shape of the handle, so it looked like a little boat.
You can see i installed the inlay with lots of glue. The old stairbuilder i used to work for said, "You can never have too much glue. But you can have too little." I remember that line every time i glue something up. Is he haunting me?
As for the ivory...i don't know how to work with it yet. I put some in water like he said, and it cupped pretty noticeably. I tried to cut some with my bandsaw and kablooie. But i found a great use for the little ivory slats: protection against file runoff. This is a 4in1 rasp, which i used a hell of a lot on this bow.
radius:
An interesting thing happened.
I put the rosewood on the tips not thinking that what i was doing was making the nock to nock distance Longer than what i had tillered the bow at. I was sunk, cuz i thought that this would reduce the draw weight. I thought this because to raise draw weight you can shorten the bow, lengthening the bow seemed likely to reduce the draw weight. But if anything, the bow pulls a few pounds heavier. I don't offer any explanation.
But i am going to do a force draw curve for this one. I'll get that on a little later.
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