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Black cherry recommendations, And boom she goes

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Badger:
 If the bow would have been an arc of the circle tiller bending through the handle evenly I think you had almost enough mass, but not enough for the stiff center you were showing.

Mo_coon-catcher:
The worst part was that te areas mentioned were the places I was going to rasp to drop the weight to bring it around more. I was sort of mimicking the yew bows I was shown by John at MoJam in getting the handle to moving towards the end f the draw cycle. The next one wil be bend more evenly early on. Along with being on the long string to a bit further in the draw so the inital brace will be a bit closer to the final weight I'm after. Think it's worth a thin backing like flooring paper to assist in te tension or try to get it to work as a self bow. Atleast at the distance I had it pulled, there were no frets before the tension failed.

Kyle

WillS:
Personally I'd go with a backing.  Get a working bow out of it first, then remove the backing and see if it holds, then make one without.

Your tillering process would work fine for yew as it's such a forgiving wood, but with these funky meanewoods you have to be so careful to spread those stresses early and evenly.

The long string is a bit of a controversial one as well - many bowyers who make superb heavy bows don't use long strings, especially not for a 100lb bow.  Something that light can be floor / vice tillered to begin with, then braced as soon as possible. 

If you watch Ian Sturgess' recent video you can see the process clearly.  It's a case of ensuring perfect tapers and watching the mass, getting the bow virtually finished before it even sees the tillering tree.  This minimises set, and drastically reduces the strain put on a bow early on, while many other bow makers drag it down on a long string to see where the problems are - by which point those problems have already damaged the bow.

However, all of that said, with unknown woods and unfamiliar draw weights a long string does keep things safe, at the risk of having a lower performing bow.  I think for what you're doing (at this stage just trying to make the thing work!) a long string is wise, but perhaps only to brace height.  Provided the bow is fairly even at brace height, you should be able to see almost all the problems with the tiller from the full brace shape.

willie:

--- Quote ---It's a case of ensuring perfect tapers and watching the mass, getting the bow virtually finished before it even sees the tillering tree.
--- End quote ---

Will, I agree with getting the bow close to finished before bending it much. How close do you like to get yours before stringing?

WillS:
As close as possible! 

For example, I just finished up a 50lb self yew, and it was on the tiller for about 10 minutes entirely.  I took the stave down to the finished bow size straight away, establishing all the tapers, rounded corners and fitting the horn nocks, braced it and checked it looked ok at brace and when I was happy I took it to about 20" I think.  Some tweaking here and there and it was taken to 28", sanded and ready to sell.

I'm nowhere near experienced enough to pull that off with a heavy bow yet, so I'll take much longer on stuff over about 120lb, but the process remains the same. 

I used to keep the staves huge for ages, drawing them on a long string over and over again, checking with circles drawn on the PC and so on and it just always resulted in disappointing bows.  It also doesn't seem remotely "medieval" which is where my interest lies.  I can't imagine thousands of bows being tentatively drawn on long strings, they'd have been cut out according to ratios depending on the timber quality, finished up and checked at the last minute I reckon.

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