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6 piece Asiatic style bamboo bow
superdav95:
So I decided to do more testing and tweaking of my bamboo bows while I’m waiting for my horn bow to dry.
This bow is a typical 5 piece Asiatic style bamboo bow with extra added little peice on top of the handle section making it a 6 piece technically. It was built with the belly and back having the power fibers of the bamboo exposed. Not sure if this will work or not in the end but we shall see it’s fun to experiment. It’s about 57” long and is 6 pieces glued together which will then be wrapped with thread or linen at the glue joints. Each bamboo strip was ground to approx thickness of .200”. So total thickness at the height of the crown on both sides is approx .400”. Each limb is 24” long and approx 1 5/8” wide. Each limb strip was lightly heat treated to rid the excess moisture and lighten up and strengthen the limbs. The levers are maple as well as the handle. I used ea40 to do glue up of the bamboo strips and induced some slight reflex. This thing is only roughed out so far and some more weight needs to come off the levers and scraping of belly for tiller for more weight reduction. That said it currently only weight 481 grams. I’m guessing it will be around under 400 grams when finished. If it survives tillering it will be a fast bow I think as it will have the benefits of good tension and good compression of the power fibers of the bamboo. After heat treatment the bamboo added a bunch of strength and became lighter. I’ve had to tweak this heat treatment process to get it right after breaking several of these bamboo bows so here’s to hoping it works this time. I’ll post a few pics of the build and bow as it sits now.
Thanks for looking
Cheers.
Dave
superdav95:
More pics…
bownarra:
Cool stuff :)
Just be careful about those handle pieces. They will 'pop off' like that. They may be ok if you wrap them. Ideally on this sort of bow you would want the handle piece/s inbetween the 2 boo strips. like a glass bow riser - the riser is a big powerlam and no glue joints will ever fail. The problem is that you have to prep the riser properly...true feather edge fades, and very good taper rate, no thicker than 1/8" 1 inch from the tips.
superdav95:
--- Quote from: bownarra on March 06, 2022, 02:30:48 am ---Cool stuff :)
Just be careful about those handle pieces. They will 'pop off' like that. They may be ok if you wrap them. Ideally on this sort of bow you would want the handle piece/s inbetween the 2 boo strips. like a glass bow riser - the riser is a big powerlam and no glue joints will ever fail. The problem is that you have to prep the riser properly...true feather edge fades, and very good taper rate, no thicker than 1/8" 1 inch from the tips.
--- End quote ---
Thanks man. It’s a neat and weird little experiment anyway. It’s just a test bow so I just used high heat hot melt glue to glue on handle so that I can reverse it quickly and change up my tapers on the new limbs. The final product will likley have it glued up with a lam riser in between the lams like you say. Thanks for the tips on this. Have you ever tried an Asiatic style bow like this with outer fibers of bamboo on both side of the limbs? I’m going to try scraping the belly to fine tune tiller and see how it goes. I’m just not sure if on compression the boo will take me scraping it on the belly side when stressed. My thoughts are that if I get the taper correct like you say I would only have to do a little side tillering without touching the belly much at all for better results. Do you have experience with something like this?
Cheers
Bob Barnes:
I'm following your experiment...it looks like it would have a very heavy draw right now. Very cool... :OK
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