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Experimental bow - English Ash, 95# @ 32" finished pics.

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WillS:
That's a very good point.  I was thinking about doing it anyway and just re-doing all the glue, as none of it is holding anything together structurally, just stopping the thing coming apart at full draw.  However, I think you're right - I'll leave the tempering!

PatM:
I was thinking more for your health rather than the health of the bow.

Del the cat:
Well done.
I sometimes think these bonkers, have a go, nothing to loose bows teach us more about bow making than the painstaking work with a near perfect stave.
I think it allows us to give free rein to our feel and our instincts, a bit like snap shooting vs holding at full draw for 10 seconds.
It's all good experience for when you find a minor shake in an otherwise perfect stave, you can shrug and spit in it's eye  :laugh:
Nice one.
Del

JW_Halverson:
Del is absolutely right.  But that advice ONLY applies to a bowyer with experience.  If you don't have the requisite road miles under your saddle, you are operating totally blind and on guesswork.  But with experience, you are working out solutions where you have a grasp of causes and effects. 

The juggling/theatre group The Flying Karamozov Brothers has a routine called "Jazz".  The individual members of the group come out on stage one at a time.  The first exhibits a basic 3 item juggle.  It's called Discipline 1.  The next involves a variation on it called Discipline 2, and so forth until they have 5 Disciplines shown to the audience and the audience understands how each is built on the previous.  They explain that you may NOT break the Disciplines or things fall out of the air and that's not interesting....well, not after the first time!  Then all 5 come out on stage with Lord knows what all....and they begin to break the rules of all 5 Disciplines.  Stuff is flying thru the air at random, guys end up juggling way too many disparate objects until they can foist them off on someone else, stuff is falling to the ground and being brought back into play in the most amazing ways, and the audience is well and truly blown away by their Mastery.  None of which can done without knowing the Disciplines.

I apply this philosophy to everything.  But especially bow making. Until you understand the rules and why they are the rules, you cannot exploit the exceptions to the rules. 

I reiterate, Will, this was luck, skill, and experience along with a touch of Jazz.

WillS:
I love that, thanks JW.  If only it was bloody shorter so it could go in a Signature...

Incidentally, one of my favourite albums to have on while working on bows is We Want Miles, featuring the unparalleled Mike Stern on guitar.  It's something I try and get all my students to listen to when they ask how to sound like they're playing "out of the box" without losing sense of the key or timing.  So perhaps there's some jazz (said with jazz hands) in this bow, as it was playing while I was soaking the thing in superglue.

The bow has horn nocks fitted now, and I'm just in the process of doing the final width taper to the tips.  It's looking really nice in the hand now, just a shame about the amount of set it took.  I think along with the humidity a large factor was in my aiming for 110# at 32" and tillering it to meet that weight, but eventually having to knock it down to around 95#.  Still, it'll make a good training bow.  Just won't be setting any records ;)

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