Author Topic: Made a board bow design tool  (Read 3328 times)

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Offline txdm

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Made a board bow design tool
« on: February 23, 2017, 09:55:51 pm »
I've been working on this little widget over the last few days that helps you visualize and get measurements for turning a board into a bow:

http://nullent.org/bbd/

Right now it's pretty bare bones, but I'd like to add:
  • a dropdown of different starting designs
  • ability to save your current custom design locally
  • some nice print options
  • convert decimals to fractionals

Thanks for looking!

Offline loon

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Re: Made a board bow design tool
« Reply #1 on: February 24, 2017, 04:50:59 am »
Leet.
Glad to see a fellow hacker

Other possible cool stuff:

Being able to calculate good starting thickness taper based on given width taper of limbs
Expected safe draw length/weight calculations, for a given design and wood
Allowing for "eiffel" tips
...Asymmetry?

« Last Edit: February 26, 2017, 10:56:03 pm by loon »

Offline Sasquatch

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Re: Made a board bow design tool
« Reply #2 on: February 26, 2017, 10:30:26 pm »
Man that is cool  I appreciate the time it took to make that. I usually just wing it. Ha

Offline txdm

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Re: Made a board bow design tool
« Reply #3 on: February 27, 2017, 09:36:49 am »
Thanks Sasquatch. The drop down menu of templates, and maybe ability to save your custom design are coming next.

Offline willie

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Re: Made a board bow design tool
« Reply #4 on: February 27, 2017, 10:27:58 am »
have you seen woodbears excell spreadsheet? it capable of a complete design and has various graphic outputs?

It  calculates widths vs various materiel's, lengths, crossections levels of stress, brace heights,etc

very usable, probaly in version 3 or so, but has not had much development in the past few years

Offline txdm

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Re: Made a board bow design tool
« Reply #5 on: February 27, 2017, 11:28:30 am »
have you seen woodbears excell spreadsheet? it capable of a complete design and has various graphic outputs?

Never heard of it...but I'd love to have a look.

Offline joachimM

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Re: Made a board bow design tool
« Reply #6 on: February 27, 2017, 11:44:40 am »
There are two such spreadsheets, neither of which are particularly easy to handle, but good things require some time. RTFM.
One was made by Woodbear aka Dave Dewey, the other by Alan Case. Alan's spreadsheet is known as "supertiller".

You can find Woodbear's spreadsheet (xls) here, but you need a yahoo groups account. https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/PaleoPlanet/files
If you don't want to bother, I'll mirror it on a google drive.
Supertiller: see this page. http://www.buildyourownbow.com/build-alongs/how-to-use-supertiller-build-along/

Some time ago I found out there seemed to be a bug in Woodbear's spreadsheet, and I even found out how to correct it, but I forgot about it and am still stuck with it. But actually I don't use these anymore. It's easier and more fun to just build bows...

For more info: search the site for supertiller and Woodbear.
The yahoo support site (for an older version of the Paleoplanet site, by the way) also has a spreadsheet for Badger's bow mass calculator (see the mass principle).


Offline willie

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Re: Made a board bow design tool
« Reply #7 on: February 27, 2017, 12:01:50 pm »
I was looking to see if it is still there, when  Joachim got the link up......

do you recall the bug you found?, Joachim.  I did find that woodbears  sheet works better running in excel, rather than open/libre office calc or gnumeric

Offline txdm

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Re: Made a board bow design tool
« Reply #8 on: February 27, 2017, 12:02:57 pm »
I'll take a look at those.

My biggest goal with the widget is to help builders easily calculate the distances they need to mark on a board based on whatever input they choose.

Offline GlisGlis

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Re: Made a board bow design tool
« Reply #9 on: March 02, 2017, 07:13:51 am »
very well done!!
i'd make the "mid limb width" option a "x distance from center width"
that could allow more versatility