Primitive Archer

Yao could have saved you some trouble going down the rabbit hole of gas burners.  Too bad.  They didn’t work well for me either.  The only things that ended up working for me was a good heat gun which take a lot of time even if you build a holder, and a hot coal bed.  The coal bed is the best in my opinion to get a thorough cook.  You will benefit from protecting your back with a heat resistant material like insulation or insulating foil perhaps.  I used a roll of pink insulation layer out on sticky foil tape that worked.  I’ve since moved to roxul the green stuff held in a strip with foil tape and then weight that down as is cooks.  I find it doesn’t send glass fiber floaties around in the air like the pink stuff does.  Anyway some thing to consider for next time.  I also don’t heat treat woods like western or eastern cedars or junipers or yew really.  At least not the same as we would with white woods.  If doing corrections in twist or alignment fixes use steam. It will make the corrections more safe and drastically reduce your splinter lifts or breaks if done right.  Overheating can cause wood to become too brittle and snap.  White woods generally take more heat better the other woods even Osage.  So long as you take measures to avoid too much wrap around heat effect on the stave white woods can tolerate a lot.  I’ve got many hhb, hickory, elm and others in white wood category that have taken darker then normal heat cook over coals and been great shooters.  Even bamboo is a great candidate for heat treatment.  I know a lot of guys don’t do this but for me I’ve found some noticeable benefit from doing it.  If using bamboo for backing only heat treatment on the non rind side.  Especially for backing.  If using a bamboo backed and bellied bow then there is benefit to doing a treatment on the compression belly side boo only.  Some of my fastest bow have been these ones.  Anyway lots of info here on the forum.  Do some searches I’m sure you’ll see some good examples to give you a good reference.  Message me directly too if you like. superdav95@gmail.com

Looks a little stiff in the outer part of lower limb for sure. Gets harder to know what isnt a bow from here on

Burnsie we grew up very much the same.

I grew up on a dairy farm. My grandpa shipped his milk in the old milk cans. My dad switched over to a bulk tank with a cooler and agitator. We still carried all the milk to the tank by hand and dumped it in through a filter. I remember when we got a “modern “ pipeline. That really helped. The milk was carried to the tank by the pipeline and it saved a ton of work. In the summer you could look in any direction and see Holstein cows grazing in a pasture. 30 to 60 milk cows per herd.

We raised sugar beets and edible beans. Both of which had to be cultivated and hoed by hand. Believe me. I know where the saying “He got a hard row to hoe “ comes from. Of course we had hay to bale and straw to. We learned really young never to complain about being bored. Dad could always find something to do.

We were pretty good at finding things to do to. Didn’t take much to entertain us. We got rid of the milk cows in the 90’s and raised beef cattle until 2012. My son still has beef cattle and I help him out to.

Same here. A few Dutch farmers started up much bigger operations and now they are pretty much the only dairies around. I guess they can have it. I certainly don’t miss the cows. Did I mention it was twice every day. Plus all the other stuff. Cleaning pens, feeding calves, breaking in heifers that had never had a calf and been milked before. Dehorning and casturating calf. Not to mention the very important job of getting the cows bred back so they would have another calf and produce milk again. I honestly don’t know how those big operations do it.

I much prefer the crop side now. It’s still a lot of work, but I enjoy it. I find it challenging and rewarding. Not so much financially, but it’s good for my soul.

Bjrogg

Brian,
I grew up in the NW portion of Wisconsin where dairy farming was king. Families were raised and thrived off small 80-200 acre dairy farms with 50-100 milk cows.  My grandparents had a small 80 acre farm and produced grade B milk that was still picked up by the creamery in milk cans - (I'm aging myself).  I basically grew up on that farm, its where I learned work ethic and how to be thankful for the little things in life. Dairy farming is a hard life - those cows had to be milked twice a day "every" day - holidays, weekends it didn't matter "every" day (up at 4:00 am for morning milking, back in the house by 8:00-9:00 pm after evening milking). Did I mention it was every day.  In between you got to go work on your crops, or treat the herd for pink eye, or one of the other 50 things that can affect a cow.  Most farmers didn't trust anyone else to take care of their herd, so they never took a day off.  As a teenager during the summers I milked for several farmers so they could take off 1 week for a vacation - they trusted me.  Milking wore out a lot of good men constantly bending/stooping over to put on milkers. I went off to college and never became a dairy farmer.
Sadly, none of the small dairies that dotted the landscape exist anymore where I grew up.  2-3 mega dairies have scooped up all the the small farms, and opened up fence lines to create bigger fields.  The old barns and silos are dilapidated or gone.  The big players now have huge high tech milking parlors and run over 1000-1500 cows, basically around the clock.  They are impressive operations, but I sure miss the simpler times. 

Too slow I did it anyway


One heat treated elm/ black locust stave.

I’m have zero investment in this, I might work but I’m not 100% about the backing strip, got a pin knot in it that I didn’t realise until I was flexing up was on the back side of the strip not the belly side as I had intended for it to be. Just got mixed up.
Glueing with cascamite and I scraped the mating surfaces with a hacksaw blade.

I use silicon spray on the bed of the thickness planer, I ran the glue surface over the belt sander and then scraped and then cleaned with isopropyl. Silicone spray is possible the worst thing for a glue joint so I hope I got it all!

The new elm stave is going to need some work to get it straight