Congratulatons to Greg Bagwell of Clarksville, Tennessee
Self Bow of the Month for April
He Prevailed Over a Difficult Piece of Osage
Greg has a good writeup about this bow:
This is the latest bow I've made, and one of the most challenging. It was a very knarley piece of Tn. osage, and I wondered more then once if it would make a bow. I originally laid it out 1-1/2" in width. While using dry heat to attempt to remove a bad deflex dip in the upper limb right out of the fades, a bad crack on the belly appeared at that spot and went out the edge of the bow. I might have been able to glue and wrap it, but instead decided to narrow the limb to 1-1/4" to remove the crack. I removed the entire 1/4" from one side of the bow to get rid of the crack. This would make it the narrowest adult osage bow I've made. I had to live with the dip in the limb because I couldn't remove it. The bow also had cracks at each tip running between grains. My first inlays were also added to this bow to remove the cracks. I wanted to put copperhead skins on the bow, but between the skins Pappy and I had on hand, we didn't have a set long enough to cover the full length. So I left the last 6" to the tips bare osage and wrapped the end of the skins, also a first for me. All previous snake skin backed bows (rattlers) were running full length of the limbs.
The bow is 60-1/2" ntn, 1-1/4" width to 3/8" tips, and 48# @ 26". The dip in the top limb makes the tiller look off, but I think the tiller is decent, and tweaking more would have removed more weight which I didn't want to do.
I'd like to say that I've learned a lot from many of the folks on this site. Many of the fine bows I've seen and the great information freely passed on encouraged me to take risks with this bow that I wouldn't have taken before.
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