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Tribute to Dean Torges

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organic_archer:
Good evening, everyone. It took 10 years of building before finally making my first bow inspired by the late Dean Torges. His book is one of my favorites and has been read many times, but I was always hesitant to try his aggressive design.

I’ll post the bow here within the next couple days, but it finished as an osage bow of 62” overall length and high 60’s draw weight. It’s a “D bow” at brace and a “C bow” fully drawn. I strayed from his methods slightly by backing it with paper thin goat hide, mostly because my hunting bows tend to get lots of dings in the thick timber around here. Rawhide backing has been a welcomed protector of my favorite bows’ backs.

It turned out to be a really fine shooter and I’ll be finishing out my deer season with it. I thought the faceted tillering was a fairly fool-proof way to nail tiller and it did seem easier than tillering with a flat belly. 

After much research into the backlogs of this forum, I found no shortage of praise for his design and craftsmanship but very few examples of Torges style bows.

If any of you have made a bow with his faceted tillering and rounded belly, I’d love to open a new discussion of the merits of this style. What are your thoughts? If you’ve ever built one, please share a couple photos!

George Tsoukalas:
No doubt, Dean was a special man. We shared our common Greek heritage. I met Dean at the 2003 Mojam.  Pretty eventful for me. Jawge

Bob Barnes:

--- Quote from: George Tsoukalas on November 03, 2022, 09:04:41 am ---No doubt, Dean was a special man. We shared our common Greek heritage. I met Dean at the 2003 Mojam.  Pretty eventful for me. Jawge

--- End quote ---
...that was a great Mojam George! 

Organic_archer, there should be a lot of discussion and pictures for you...there was a time when it seemed like everyone made their bows as close as possible to the FireStix.  This will be a good thread.

Eric Krewson:
Deans book "Hunting the Osage bow" was a game changer for me, particularly on how to handle fresh cut osage properly. I started using his bow designs but didn't use the facet tillering he recommended in his book. I called to order one of his bowyer's edge tools, he answered the phone, we talked bows, bow making and hunting for quite a while.

When I first started out making bows I experimented with a lot of whacky ideas and posted my results on the Stickbow site. Dean saw my posts and said that I "was an insult to the true art of bow making", he wasn't trying to be humorous, he was dead serious. This rubbed me the wrong way at the time but looking back, he was probably right.

At the time Dean said this, I thought I could come up with some better bow making processes than the old masters, after ruining a lot of good osage I found out I was dead wrong. I did come up with the Tillering gizmo during this experimentation phase so it wasn't a complete waste of time.

Aksel:
A short and heavy bow with rounded belly sounds like recipe for chrysaling, at least for white woods.  Maybe it works well with Osage and yew. Does anyone on the forum forum favour this design for white woods? Will be interesting to follow this thread  :)

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