A few months ago I got this really crooked piece of laburnum with a huge reflexed kink right in the middle from my friend Pinaka Longbows. The stave was already cut with a bandsaw so my width was pretty much set at about 1.2 inch max. (Stave pic below)
I first started to get the sapwood down to three rings. This worked really easy with this piece of laburnum since it has a nice crunchy darker layer between the sap rings.
Now I knew that much reflex would almost be impossible to keep in a self bow but it felt like a waste to just steam it out. Then I remembered Simson’s osage fivecurves and decided that this was the perfect stave have a go at that!
So I cut a caul for the deflexed parts out of some pine and steamed the deflex next to the handle in. I used my old reflex caul to steam in the reflexed tips. This was done in four sessions in about a week. Left it to rehydrate for another week and started tillering.
Now this stave has quite a few knots and most of them where really brittle and some even crumbled out so I drilled them out on the belly and inserted some laburnum plugs from another piece I had lying around. After first brace I had to correct one of the deflex curves because they where to uneven for my liking. Then after reducing the width at the tips I had to do about eight! heat corrections to get the string alignment right. I don’t think I ever used so much heat on a bow to get it to shoot!
Finished it up with buffalo horn tip overlays and arrow pass.
The handle is really rounded so decided on a simple wrap to make life easier. Wrapped it with a strip of leather and a cotton shoe lace and that came out way prettier then I expected, sometimes the easy way out is better;-)
Specs:
Wood: Laburnum
Length: 64” ntn
Draw weight: #50@28”
String: 8 strand fast flight
Tip Overlays: Buffalo horn
Arrow pass: Buffalo horn
Handle: Cow leather strip combined with shoe lace
//stave
// profiles
// braced
// handle
// details
// fd
