Primitive Archer
Main Discussion Area => HowTo's and Build-a-longs => Topic started by: High-Desert on July 12, 2018, 10:25:19 am
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I have always wanted to do a build along, but every time I start, I forget to take pictures at so many steps, that it never comes together. So I am going to give this a try again, and maybe by starting the build along I will feel more obligation to take pictures along the way.
The goal is a 60" yew recurve, with some sort of snakeskin backing. I said goal, so how it actually turns out seems never to be the same as I plan.
The stave is from the straightest yew tree I have ever seen. There was 144" of clean perfectly straight trunk, with one section with a few knots. This tree gave me 9 beautiful 72" staves and 4 that weren't quite as good. The 144" section was cut in two, then each split into 1/6, and one of those staves split again, giving me 13 staves. The staves have been in my shop since March 2017.
The end of the stave has a bit of twist from drying, nothing too bad. I will cut the stave to 62". The far end of the stave will be cut off, the more twisted section, as can be seen in the photo. Then I will use my draw knife to remove the bark. I am not careful at this stage, as I will be thinning
The sapwood to 1/4" after the bow is roughed out. I will also be chasing a ring in the sapwood once it's roughed out and thinned.
Any criticism or suggestions along the way would be great.
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Beautiful stave. Good luck on your build along, I'll be following. :OK
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Sounds like a good plan. Thanks for doing the build a long.
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I'll be watching very closely! Got a yew stave to work on! Thinking about something close to the Meare Heath, or Sudbury design, but still have to get the hickory to draw length and weight! Fast, I ain't!
Hawkdancer
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Are those pictures sideways? I posted them on my phone, and they are right side up when I pull the site on there.......
Hawkdancer, this is one of the sister staves to the yew stave I sent you in the supply trade. I look forward to seeing what you do with that yew, as well as that hickory your working on.
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I have removed the bark with a drawknife, leaving just a bit of the pinkish colored cambium layer, shown in the above picture.
Since this stave has been split, using a fabric tape, I measure across the stave and find the centerline. I do this every 6" or so down the stave, then connect the marks, this established my centerline. There are several ways to do this, some just follow the grain down the middle, or follow the high section of the crown down. I like measuring everything, so I have found this method works well for me.
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With fabric tape, it is difficult to hold it at 0 on the edge, so I start at 10", just for ease of dividing by 2, to find the center.
I then begin to mark out the rough dimensions of the desired bow. I mark off 1" from each end to mark where my nocks will be. Nock to nock will be 60" on this bow. I then find the center of the bow and mark 2" either side for the grip, then 2" out further for the fades. The handle lines are marked out at 1-1/4" at center, and 1-1/8" and the handle fade contact, then run the lines out to 1-3/4" wide, these run to mid limb, then taper to 1/2" at the tips. When I rough out the bow, I will follow just shy of the lines until I am about 8" from the tips, where I will stay about an inch wide to make recurving a bit easier and prevent twisting.
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I did make little mistake.....I was planning on reducing the sapwood to about 1/4", but I forgot to do that before roughing out. So the stave is rouhged out, which I used the bandsaw for, but sometimes I will use a hatchet to rough out the stave. It really depends on the temperature outside. Right now, its way too hot, so it had been roughed out on the bandsaw, but it really doenst take much longer to rough out a stave with a hatchet. Once the stave was roughed out, I began reducing the sapwood with a draw knife. I use a small device I made for measuring thickness that references off of one side of the stave. I forgot to get pictures of it, but I will gets some. The device helps me keep thicknesses consistent when getting the belly down to thickness and reducing the sapwood.
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Heres the stave with the sapwood reduced. Next, I will be chasing a ring in the sapwood. This step is not necessary, but I like doing it and it looks better when a ring is chased.....even tho I will be putting snake skings on this one. Chasing a ring in sapwood is not that difficult, the key is proper lighting. When the light hits it just right, coming just over one of your shoulders. I typically start with the drawknife, to get close to a ring, Then using a cabinet scraper, do the final touches.
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I'm keeping tabs! haha hope you take it to the end!
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After I have taken the sapwood down to rough thickness with a drawknife. I chase a final ring with the cabinet scraper. Here I didn't choose a deep enough ring to chase, so I have a few violations, about three rings. I am not concerned about this, so I will leave it.
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Next, I will recurve the tips, I have always done this before the tillering process, usually just getting the limbs bending a bit, and thinning the limb tips to the right thickness to allow bending. Chasing a ring on the belly side where the recurve will be, helps prevent split out. I start by soaking the limb tip in water overnight, then boiling the tips for about an hour before bending. I set up my form before bending so I can get it bent as fast as possible. Then leave it in the form for a day while I soak the other side.
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After both sides have been recurved and dried a few days, and I have the limbs bending a bit, it typically do an initial heat treating, along with a bit of straighting. When doing relatively drastic recurves, string alignment can be an issue, so I get everything lined up in this initial heat treating. I may have to do this several times to get it all lined up. Its important to get things lined up before getting to brace so the string will stay on the recurves. There will definitely be some sine tuning along the way with a series of heating treating and tweaking to get everything lined up.
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This first heat treating is pretty aggressive, going pretty hot and not worrying too about much how hot I get the wood.
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Well, I did run into a problem, I ended up with a lateral crack near the sapwood, right in the fades. So I will take some wood out to see if I can get to the bottom of the crack.
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After getting to the bottom of the crack and evening up the rest of the fade area to match, my fades or extended greatly, so this may change things along the way.
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it looks like my fades will be 4" long each, which really limits my working limb, so I will allow the fades to do a bit of work, so it may be tricky.
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After recurving, where I left the tips wide, and what looks like good alignment, I will narrow the tips to just over a half inch at the tips.
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I used to wait to put the tip overlays on, but I have had the string split out the by the string grooves where I didn't round it. I dont round the string grooves or it leaves small glue gaps where I glue on the overlay. Overlays aren't much work, so I dont mind doing them, even if everything doesn't work out in the end.
This will be my first time tapering the tips versus just gluing on the overlays to the sapwood. I measure 1/4" from the back and mark it, then 2" from the tip, and connect the line and saw off with a Japanese razor saw, and using a file, I make sure the area to receive the overlay is perfectly flat. Then I just glue on a black off my material, here is african blackwood. Then wrap in a strip of innertube.
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Once the tips are dry, I mark off what I need removed, and saw off with the razor saw, and using a rattail rasp, cut in my string grooves.
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Now I can really get into tiller. I like to use my bench vise to look at how the limbs are bending. This is basically floor tillering minus the floor, although I do both. This method is really nice for highly reflexed staves like Vine Maple.
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Im getting a pretty good and even bend out the limbs, so I clean up my tips, getting them rounded and string grooves in place. Which I forgot to get pictures of. Its bending enough to get a string on it. I usually don't do much of a low brace. I get it bending where I think it should be, whatever that means, and go to about a 5" brace. It really depends on the string I have available. It looks pretty even at first brace.
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This is cool …...enjoying this!
DBar
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I hook it up and pull a few light pulls to see how she looks. (I didn't ask if it was a she, I'm assuming because the tree had berries. So go with the biological definition). Anyway, when I get it pulling even, I put it on the tiller stick, sitting on a bathroom scale and begin pulling to my desired final draw weight. I don't really trust cheap bathroom scales, so i calibrate them with something that is close to my desired draw weight, in this case, a 53lb Kettlebell. I place the KB on the scale with tiller board and stave (not a bow yet), and set scale to 53lbs. And this is what she looks like at 14". it looks pretty even at this point.
I will attempt to do the no set tillering method from here on out. Im having a feeling that I may have to drop a bit from my desired 50lb-55lb draw.
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I took these last few posts photos over the last week and my phone was having issues taking photos, storage full or something like that, so I missed the middle of the tillering stage. But I did try the no set method. I used 16" as my reference point to start with. After each wood removal, I pulled to 16" and took note of the weight, then exercised 50 times at 55lbs, then remeasured at 16". I did this each time, moving my reference point out to where it read around 46-48lbs, taking note of that measurement, then pulling 50 times again, and rechecking at the reference. I did this to about 24" draw and noticed very little change in my measurement but noticed some set in the limbs after taking the string off. Im not sure why this would be, but I decided to go ahead with heat treating the limbs again as I did before, but this time, where the wood took on the slightest brown color, just barely noticeable. I went back to tillering. After heat treating, it gained back quite a bit of poundage, so I was back to about 23" at 55lbs. The same thing happened again, took noticeable set. So I heat treated again, and decided to go for a target weight of 45lbs. This was much better. Now its coming in 45lbs at 23" after heat treating and retillering.
I build an arrow that I use for taking pictures of the bow drawn by hand that has painted lines of it that represent draw length since I can never see hand written inch marks. It's easier than placing tape at the draw length the bow is at, and pulling to it, and constantly changing it.
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I worked on a bit more tillering. After 24" of draw, I don't use the tree much, but take pictures of the bow hand draw with my phone set in a vise, with a timer set, taking 10 rapid photos. This way I can bring around the top limb to even of the tiller. This can just as easily be done by feel once you have your tiller good to go and you just need to bring the top limb around, giving the positive tiller. I like to take photos just to be sure everything stays even tho. So i have her out to 45lbs at 26", and pulling 48lbs at 27" just for safety. I took it out and put 100 arrows through her as well as a few hundred pulls to full draw on the tiller board. We'll see if she holds her shape after leaving it strung for a night, and a bit more shooting. Well that was more fun than tree'n a coon, now, on to the hard part of bow making.....the finish.
I will try to decide on what skins to put on it. I have a few copperheads, pacific rattlesnake, a WDB, and a canebrake to choose from. I'm not sure yet. After that, ill begin layers of truoil, this is where everything slows down for me, like a herd of turtles through peanut butter. This might take me a few months.....although I am getting a bit better at it. Now I need to clear my phone and make room to take pictures.
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Nice work, you're making it look too easy! :OK
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Got out to the shop today to try and get a few photos after clearing my phone a bit.
I decided to shape the tip overlays like rattlesnake rattles, an idea I got from Dan Viles, a bow maker who lives a few blocks away. I asked him if it was ok that I used the idea, and he didn't mind. I had decided to go with copperhead skins, but when I was in the middle of making the tips look like rattles.... I realized copperheads.....don't have rattles. It would bother me to to do something like that, so I will go with some sort of rattler.
Here's an unbraced profile pic.
Here is where I am with the tips. These have taken me much longer than I expected. I went at these with a triangle shaped file, and a round file. It's been difficult to round the inner portion of the rattle.
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I had a small brand made last year, to brand my wood stuff. If I heat it enough and let it sit on the wood for about 5 seconds, it makes a nice groove that I can inlay material into. A buddy of mine uses turquoise in a lot of his woodwork and gave me a bit to use so I thought I'd give it a try on this bow. I gilled the groove with fine turquoise, and covered in CA glue, and then wiping down with a rag dipped in denatured alcohol, then repeated the process to ensure the grooves were full.
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Nice looking bow! The rattler tips are unique, and nifty! Good build along!
Hawkdancer
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Great build along and real nice lookin bow
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Thanks for taking us along on your build[no set tillering included].Many on here love this type of bow.I like it and that's a very fine bow in my opinion with the added details to it.Congratulations.
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Great work so far
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Great job on everything. Thanks for taking the time to document it. Very helpful
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After being so busy lately with work, I finally got back to working on the bow. It did take a while to decide on what skins to use for the backing. I have a bunch of Pacific rattlesnake skins, none of which match each other very well, so I decided to use the skins I got from Cipriano in a trade. The skins were a bit over 50" long, and I only needed 28", so I cut them down. With 20" left over that I will be able to do a partial backing.
I got the back dyed with some black leather dye a few weeks ago, so its good and dry.
To match the tip overlays, I soaked the skins and cut the tips to match. I returned the skins to water, and coated one limb with some TBII, and dipped my fingers in water and rubbed on the back of the bow to thin the glue out a bit. By doing this, I have had fewer issues with glue bubbles under the skin.
I normally do not wrap the skins with ace bandages, but this skin did not want to lay down like most, so I wrapped the recurved areas, and continued working the skins down with my fingers, then finished the wrapping.
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After 15 minutes, I unwrapped the ace bandages to prevent them from leaving an ace bandage pattern on the skins.
Before wrapping, I had used a razor to cut the skins close to the bow.
After about 1.5 - 2 hours, I use 150 grit sandpaper stapled to a piece of lath, and at a steep angle, pushing down and towards the tips, I trim the skins to fit.
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Where did you have the branding iron made? I like that idea!
Hawkdancer
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There is a place online called Shapeways. This one is actually designed to hook to a lighter, but I don’t see a lighter getting it hot enough. I think they are around $25-30 for a custom shape.