I recently had a request for a heavy weight warbow and the fellow asked if I could do a build along here on it, to which I said yes. I started on the bow about 3 weeks ago by first going through my supply of Ironwood and picking out a suitable piece, I wanted something with some natural reflex to it. I then reduced it to rough dimensions and then sticking it in the attic of my shop for a week or so, it was sunny at the time and perfect for reducing the MC to very low levels. The reason for this is that this bow is to be a heat-treated bow and when the thickness of the wood gets somewhat thick you can get some nasty surprises when heat-treating. Even with a very low MC you need to go very slow when heat-treating a thick stave, it took me almost a week to heat-treat this bow. The problem is that the high heat pushes water ahead of it inside the wood and if it builds up to fast it can split the belly so I had to start and stop many times. The splitting doesn't affect the function of the bow but it does affect the aesthetics of it. Once I felt that the stave was dry enough I took it down and finished roughing out the shape and proceeded to get ready to heat-treat it. Here is a picture of the roughed out bow.
The stave was nicely reflexed and this was good as even with heat-treating I expected the bow to take some set.. Anyway as I said above it took me the better part of a week to fully heat-treat the bow. I let the bow hydrate for a few days then I started to do a bit of tillering, this was last week. I clamped the bow sideways in my vise and pushed on the limb tips, it was like pushing on a tree. The starting dimensions were 1 1/2" wide at the center by 1 1/16" thick and gradually tapering in width and thickness with an overall length of 75". I worked away reducing the width to just under 1 7/16" wide but still leaving the thickness to over 1" thick. Here is a picture of the bow at that point.
I was slowly ably to "floor" tiller it, using my vise, then with the use of a long string I got it tillered up to brace height, which is where I am at now. The bow gave me a nasty one yesterday though. I was doing some long string tillering using a T stick with the bow clamped into my vise and hadn't noticed that the bow was twisting a bit. I had the bow pulled back and locked in place with the T stick at about 15" of draw so I could examining the tillered shape when the T stick twisted off. It promptly swung around and whacked me on my thumb. Today I braced it for the first time and tried to pull it back, yikes. I need to work it down it a bit more. Out of curiosity I used my hand-held scale I tested it to about 12", it registered 70#. I don't have any pictures of the bow braced yet but will shortly.
