Main Discussion Area > Bows
Glass: a few follies
DCM:
Time for the group hug already? And it was just getting good. LOL Ole George 'll be steaming till he wakes from his nap and sees how it has turned.
I learned a ton from George, mostly to be tenacious, to have some courage and drive early on, when all is dark and foreboding, when minor and common missteps which a seasoned hand takes in stride can put a fresh recruit on the deck. And I learned a butt load from Steve, and most of you nare-do-wells that have been around a while. And I continue to learn, from Gary Davis recently a brief tidbit which was so nearly drowned out by my own talking when I should have been listening, that it did not occur to me until I replayed the exchange in my mind some days later. But I don't just accept without question, particularly in light of contradicting experience, and that I think is the tap root of advancing one's craft.
tom sawyer:
So you gonna share the Gary Davis tidbit?
He gave me the "bamboo-backed bow" versus "bow backed with bamboo" speech. There is a difference, according to him.
DCM:
I'll show you mine, if you'll show me yers.
Gary stopped me to say he liked that little character bow I had at Tn Classic. So, like any full of hisself young bowyer would I commenced to yammerin' about one thing or another as if I knew what I was doing. This bow had a whoop-d-do I didn't/couldn't get out completely with heat correction and commented on how the bow shot perdy good despite the extra limb mass. He said, paraphrasing "even thickness for straightening, then uneven thickness for bending." The even thickness for straightening was a clarification, a simplification of common sense crafting which I'd understood rhetorically all along and yet not put into practice in this case. In essense, you need the surrounding wood to use for leverage against the area you want to move.
Kegan:
Wow, I didn't know my little post was gonna go this far! Should I feel proud or ashamed ;D?
tom sawyer:
I don't get it. he's saying you needed to leave the area thicker around the whoopdedoo? Or that you needed to straighten it before you thinned it?
Gary was telling me he wrote a letter to the editor about somebody (I forget who, I think it was in TBB) calling a bamboo-backed bow, a bow backed with bamboo. And to top it off they called it a selfbow in the article. His contention was that the correct term is a bamboo-backed bow. A bow backed with bamboo, to his way of thinking, means it is a bow before it gets backed. Which most of your belly slats wouldn't qualify, nor do they have to. It was just Gary being Gary. He's always got something profound to offer. I wish he'd do the net, but there's little chance of that.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version