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Bamboo bellied bows
superdav95:
--- Quote from: Bege1987 on June 09, 2025, 05:58:44 am ---
--- Quote from: RyanY on June 04, 2025, 02:48:34 pm ---When one makes a laminated bow with bamboo on the belly, how do you determine your tapers? I’m interested currently because someone on the bowyer subreddit asked about a bamboo backed and bellied ELB style bow. I thought that would be a great idea and am interested myself but I’m not sure how to go about these types of bows.
I also have some bamboo backing strips that I could sacrifice for the belly and am wondering if heat treating the strip is much different than heat treating a normal bow solar smash
--- End quote ---
Great question! For bamboo bellies, a common taper is around .0015–.002" per inch. You’ll want a balance between stiffness and flex, and heat-treating the belly strip is similar to backing—just go lighter on the heat to avoid making it too brittle.
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Ya this is probably a good rule of thumb to go by for your tapers. You can mess around a little to experiment with a particular design and layout but should be good. I agree. The belly slats can be heat treated fairly dark but the back slat it’s risky to have too much heat to the point where you see color changes. Mainly for the back I just heated it to very light brown or till the steam escapes the tips to rid the excess moisture. There is so
Etching magical that happens when you heat treat bamboo and any wood really but in particular bamboo. The lignins and pectins in the cells of the wood harden to a more compression strong material which bamboo is not known for. At least not the inner fleshy side of the bamboo. The rind side can great for compression and tension. Essentially you can get the best of both worlds building the bow with bellied and backed with boo. Just a point to consider too is that when you heat treat bamboo strip it will swell a little and will need to be reground flat for glue up.
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