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MR79A0807

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stuckinthemud:
Thanks, that's really helpful; when you rough out, do you rasp off the sapwood and see what your left with, or rasp off then chase a ring, or chase a ring then rough out?

WillS:
I get the side profile done completely, right down to final measurements.  Then I can see exactly what's happening with the sapwood, and aim to take it down to about 4 or 5mm.  That usually does the job once I take the corners off but I tweak it as I go really.  Obviously there's no need to follow rings etc, and the originals certainly don't show any sign of that being considered so it's just a case of making the sapwood as thin as possible!  With this coarse grained English stuff, quite often I'll have just a single growth ring of sapwood in places, if the rings are wide enough.

FilipT:
Is it dangerous to leave thicker sapwood, does the chance of failure become higher?

Also, when I look at the pictures of yew timber I can see that sapwood doesn't grow the same at whole length of stave. There are places where it's 1 cm thick and suddenly drops to couple of mm, or at the next place it suddenly thickens to 1,5 cm. Good example is your 4th picture. How do you deal with this?

WillS:
Thicker sapwood makes a safer bow.  You're just increasing the amount of backing the bow has.  The trade off however is that the sapwood is not as good as heartwood, so for a high performance bow you want more heartwood.  The sapwood becomes as thin as possible - you don't actually need any at all, as seen in all the just-heartwood yew bows that have been made.  It's a tiny safety net at these weights. 

That fourth picture shows how I aim to keep the back as flat as possible, to avoid having a belly that dips and rises around every knot and swirl.  Because you don't need to follow a growth ring, and because you don't need much sapwood at all, you can draw a straight line end to end and just take the wood off to suit.  Again, there are plenty of ways of dealing with yew, the reason I do it this way is simply because that's how the originals were made.

FilipT:
Ah, so when the sapwood goes up and down makes no difference? Interesting to know, I am sure other woods would gladly have revenge on you haha

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