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Starting dimensions for yew warbow

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WillS:
+1

Exactly.

willie:
Will

I have made a few bows with 2:1 taper, and it works well for my needs. Just curious tho, when you do it this way, do you have a different width taper than the average MR? Or you prefer stiffer tips?
 I see that the MR average is just about 2:1., until the last third.....

Perhaps you and Del prefer a different tiller shape?


Shall I presume that the 1800mm bow with a linear taper is to be drawn 32"?

willie

mikekeswick:
The woods preferred tiller shape is the only way to go! That is predetermined by the thickness/width tapers. Any and every bow irrelevant of overall design recurve,elb anything will tell you the correct tiller shape by showing set as it's progressively pulled further. The wood in the bow doesn't 'know' what type of bendy stick you are turning it into all it knows is the stress it feels as you bend it and the factor that determines how far it can bend is thickness (and the woods own properties). If you deviate from this ideal because you have a set tiller shape in mind then your bow won't be quite as good as it could've been because by definition it will be overstrained somewhere. All this stuff is obvious once you learn to read what the wood is telling you. Once you've 'got it' all bows are essentially the same and you can make any design and know that the 'tiller shape' is correct.

willie:
Should a warbow  always have equal strain through out the bow, or are there historical designs that call for slightly stiffer handles and/or tips?
Or asked another way, If you are judging strain by set, are you letting the even development of set override the need for the bow to conform to a circular tiller shape, in the final 6 inches of tillering?

WillS:
I think Mike is spot on.  You can't force a tiller shape onto a bow.

Personally all the linear taper stuff is for starting.  I've had it work extremely well on a few occasions right out to around 28" of draw, at which point the tips required adjusting.

When you say width, do you mean thickness?  The width measurements are always different based on the properties of the piece of wood.  Some yew can take quite narrow width dimensions and some is lower quality and needs to be a lot wider for the same draw weight.  Generally speaking (although certainly not always the case) English yew needs to be made wider than Alpine yew such as the timber used for the original MR bows but you do of course get exceptions.

As for the 32" draw question - it's currently being researched a lot by people like Joe Gibbs and Glennan Carnie.  It was assumed for a very long time that 32" was the sensible draw length for "modern man" as we're supposed to be taller than medieval men.  This is rubbish and has been proved as such, and Joe is now tillering bows only to 30", which is of course the length of the MR arrows.  His results are good, and even people like Glennan who usually shoot up to 34" arrows are dropping down to 30".

Weirdly enough, a lot of the MR bows that were taken from the ship and drawn on a tiller have pretty bad tiller shapes.  Whether that's due to being under water for 400 years we don't know, but I've got a niggling feeling that tiller shape wasn't too important for them.  We're used to making bows today and posting them online and having people criticize them to death for not being perfect and having stiff areas etc with lines and circles being laid over them.  When making them in the hundreds of thousands for livery issue I can't somehow imagine that being the case.  They're all so similar in terms of average dimensions that it seems far more likely that they were roughed out to standard dimensions, rough-tillered and finished as quickly as possible.  They weren't designed to be used over and over and over again so it probably wasn't important.

Just my opinion of course, I may be completely wrong!

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