When did the long crack happen on the knot. The wood is to wet. Let it set a couple weeks or so and wrap both sides of that knot with rawhide when you get the bow drawn to about 20” and close to target weight. Wrap it. And my 67” bows 40@28 is 24-26 #t 20”. 50@28 is 38-40@20. You can probably get any bow of that length an weigh it and get a reference on the 20” weight rule. This is where set happens for me . That will give you an idea so you can rawhide early.. just a suggestion. Good luck with the build.
There are no cracks in that area, the dark line is simply a pencil line I drew to help me establish the centre of the limb lenght-wise. I've kept the stave in a spot where I normally measure 66-72°F and 40-50% RH until it stopped loosing weght (2 weeks ago) so I'm pretty confident it should have around 8-9% humidity left in it. Thanks for the references of draw weight - draw lenght, they will come in handy as soon as I start tillering!
In your last pic posted you show the knot cluster. It looks to me in the pic that you have left enough meat around that knot but it looks like you may have some grain run out on the right side of it. My suggestion on this knot is to have little to no grain run off here. I would make every effort to strictly keep to the grain lines around this sucker. Even if it looks a little weird and you get the urge to narrow it intuitively to match the width of the other limb don’t do it. Leave it with equal measure of wood on both sides of this knot but keep to zero grain run at this location. You can always slowly and increments of narrowing up away from this cluster to get to where you want. I agree with what others have said here too with that it’s a shorter bow to achieve to draw length and weight you are looking for but it is doable. Especially if bendy thru handle bow. This means every part of this bow is working so that is also why it’s crucial that that knot is got no run off there. You basically want the wood around that knot to support the bend stresses alone and should be able to drill out that knot and still have it bend good. Not that I’m suggesting you drill it out but my point I’m trying to make is that you need to work that knot as if it it doing the work on it own and not relying on any help from that cluster. Anyway that’s my opinion of what I’d do with the knot. It would give some neat character too. As far as the twist I may just get it bending to about 20” first following all of the dips and valleys belly to back for good consistency of thickness. Use your finger calipers as bjorn says! I think your in good shape so long as you give attention to those crucial areas of potential problems areas. Get to 20” draw then maybe worry about any twist corrections. Imho best of luck on it.
At the moment there is a bit of grain runoff on one side of the knot, the one where I've left a bit more wood. Should I keep it wider or thin it? From what I understand now about working around the knot, I should simply have the limb as wide as it should be by design in that spot plus the with of the knot itself, correct? About the alignment, I'm correcting it now because before I started the string line was laying about 1 1/2" outside the handle, so it would have been pretty much impossible to start flexing the bow without it twisting on the tillering tree.
thanks everyone for your advice, I'm pretty slow and full of insecurities when I learn something new!
