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Tapering a Osage slat question

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razorbak:
Btw I just finished gluing up my last bamboo slat to the last pc of bamboo so let’s hope number 13 survives I will unwrap tommorow afternoon and clean up the glue boogers and hopefully glue up a riser block tommorow evening and hopefully by Friday I’ll be tillering

razorbak:
Fellas I appreciate all the info you fellas have posted ! This is how I learn since no one I know is even remotely interested in bow building of any kind

willie:

--- Quote ---looking for good hickory lately
--- End quote ---

for mid 50 at 64-66 inches maybe someone will suggest a conservative width for hickory

Eric Krewson:
I have made a lot of bamboo backed bows. For your bamboo, level the belly of the slat, draw your bow pattern out on the slat as perfectly as you can, cut out your pattern and sand it to the point that every edge is 1/6" thick, this will naturally taper your bamboo slat from the handle to the tip.

1 1/4" is plenty for a BBO, if you go out to the suggested 1 1/2" you will have a lot of bambo and almost no belly wood.

Use your bambo bow blank pattern to draw the bow profile on your slat, make the osage core slightly larger than your bamboo pattern because the bamboo may shift a little during glue up.

Don't worry about grain runout on your core slat, your bambo wild hold things together. I used my twisted tight ring osage for most of my BBOs, with over 50 of these bows in the books none of them ever failed because of grain runout.

Here is an example.



Taper core slat by making a 1/2" mark on the sides at the end of fade and drop that mark 1/16" every 6" until you get to 1/4" and carry that measurement all the way to the tips. I file to the line on the edges but leave the belly slightly rounded to give me more wood to tiller. Where the side measurement is 1/4" I leave the overall thickness about 1/2".

 

Eric Krewson:
I have a lot more pictures but for some reason I can't transfer them to IMGUR to post here.

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