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Overbuilt?

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Robert Pougnier:
It actually reminds me of the meare heath artifact. But this is more elongated and with more efficient and narrow tips.

Del the cat:
Beautiful bow, clean, simple, lovely.
Del

wooddamon1:
Beautiful bow.

Tuomo:
This is a really beautiful bow!

However, the title is something of a joke… I would call this bow underbuilt. It has a very long draw length relative to its overall length; its length-to-draw-length ratio is only 2.15. I personally prefer a ratio of 2.4–2.5 (although Baker recommended 2.3), because then I can be more confident that the bow will take less set and will not break in the long run. This bow also has quite a heavy draw weight, which means it is very highly stressed. I would not dare to make a bow like this myself (I’m not good enough yet!). But you clearly had a very good piece of wood and excellent skill.

A completely different, but very interesting, topic is how to determine what you can get out of a specific piece of wood. For example, with this bow – how did you decide that the stave was good enough to make such a highly stressed bow? Experience and skill, of course, but even then you can never truly know what the wood is capable of giving you.

simk:
Haha Tuomo  :) you never know  :) until you try. But first you have to trust....because If you want to sell a bow you need that good feeling.

I first should have made that bow from yew and figured out it must be at least 78" ntn to feel good. But 78" imho is too long  for a good shooter. My customer comes from shooting a glass recurve and I didn't want to make him a snail bow - I wanted a fast bow that would do well with lighter arrows too and therefore switched to osage. In my personal experience osage is unbreakable (no fail so far) and I had seen a lots of extreme bows made from osage. I first even wanted to go for a 70"ntn but then chickend out again to a "safe" 73". I think I had made a bow from the same tree already and it felt very good.

 Time will tell. I hope I will not have to build that bow again. Thanks for the compliments!

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