Primitive Archer

I did that to both sides and then glued with normal wood glue. I don’t fancy experimenting with hide glue on this one.

Next I will do some rough shaping on the grip to see where we’re at. Then I’ll mark out my centre line and fit up the siyahs.

ne of the biggest take aways so far is that heat treating cherry smells DIVINE. One of the best wood smells I have so far experience.

On boo boo I have realised- I have constructed the handle as i have seen in the past, except my limbs are going to be a good bit wider than a horn bow. This means I’m going to struggle to get the handle width very narrow. I should have made the handle section longer, but I was trying to minimise the overall length and so shortened it all up. We will see how that plays out.

The next day I filed and fettled the splice. Ignore the centre lines they have gone out the window.
I took a bit of material off the inside of the limb side of the splice to try and get rid of the oil residue.


Then I took a hacksaw blade and cut in the grooves. I dont know what that’s called. It went pretty smoothly, in hindsight I would have done better with a coarser saw blade or taking an old scraper and cutting teeth into it. I think hacksaw teeth are a little fine maybe.

Either way it went pretty well, and I was sure to take down the limb side, again to try and get past any oil.

Originally I thought these grooves were supposed to interlock but I think actually they’re just to key the surface good and proper.

Glad you’re interested sleek, doesn’t seem to have many views so maybe I should have posted in bows? Anyway, to continue-

I made up a second former, can’t remember the name of them caul? This way I can tweak the curved a bit and also it will be belly out, not belly in as the first former was.

Then I got it mounted under the long burner. I’ve not used this much, I got a better regulator for the propane and a better tap. It maintained its flame much better. Main issue is that any moving air blows the heat away. It gets pretty hot in my shop so I had the fans blowing to keep me cool but it disturbed the flame a lot so I had to turn them off and cook myself as well as the limbs!

I tried oiling the belly’s too to even out the heat. I think it worked but as it was (another) thing I haven’t tried before on a wood I haven’t used before I’m not sure what colour the Cherry should turn after a good amount of roasting.
The biggest issue I had was the oil seeped round into the splice. Gonna have to clean that up pretty good.

After heat treating I have them a bit of a bend and then took another 3mm or so off the thickness.
Of course doing this I’ve taken back some of the heat treatment but I have no reference at all as to how thick the limbs should be.

I leave mine about a week depending on humidity.  You can save yourself some clamps but making a clamp sled.  It s a strip of seatbelt material or similar with glued on sections of 2” wood spaced out maybe 1/4”.  This will save about half the clamps you likley used to do the one limb.  I used this trick on a few and it worked great.  Adam talks about this method in his book actually. 

Hey guys.  Sorry I was away at our youth camp running the archery for the boys and  didn’t have much cell coverage.  The metal strap is likley redundant but I put it on to help put little pressure on the bend to keep it from splintering on me.  Bamboo is really tough stuff but does not like to bend when it’s been dried.  These recurves turned out amazing.  I got home today and pulled them off after 2 weeks or so to dry in the air conditioning house.  I set them with some heat to hold them too.  I will post some pictures soon of these revived limbs.  The game changer may be what sleek is referring to in that these recurves all boo limbs may qualify for certain flight competitions that it may not have been able to before.   If I can get the same performance out of these limbs it will be a game changer I believe.  Add to this the folding hinge feature will be the next thing.  I did a bunch of shooting with my 2 folder this week at camp and had a number of parents there with their boys eyeing them up and I gave some a chance to shoot them.  They were wanting to buy them right there.  That sound promising.  I got some names and phone numbers for later as I was not there to sell anything.  I had one 17 yr old boy shooting the 44lbs folder who wouldn’t put it down.  He must have shot that bow 300 times!   Anyway. It was put through it paces and still holding up great. 


Thanks again for all the interest and generous comments guys.  I have another youth camp for the girls that my wife runs and yet again I’m doing the archery.  I love it and the kids do too.  Once I’m done this camp mid July I’ll get working on putting together the video series on YouTube and link it here.  Sleek and I can work out the editing a bit to keep it reasonable and not be a bore.