While at the classic this past May, I was fortunate to meet John Price, during that weekend we chipped some rock, made some trades and became good friends. We talk to each other often by phone. While there Jon said he really liked boo lam bows, I told him that I had made Boo tri lams in the past and told him I'd make him one. since coming back from TN, I attempted a Boo/maple/boo lam for him that blew up at a node. That bow used up my last piece of raw boo. So I asked if anyone had some boo, I got 2 generous offers, one from jeffutley57 from whom I received a big bunch of boo that I will be using soon, and a second offer from Cracker(Ronnie), John said he liked the IPE lam bows so after being contacted by David Knight I ordered one of his IPE blanks, he was extremely helpful and his IPE is great. I hee hawed around trying to figure out how to go about this project, form, glue, handle, ect. I decided to go with a simple form using blocks at the tips to induce some reflex.I planed down a piece of Ronnies boo and waited for the IPE to arrive.
Compared to the bows I've seen recently posted by ricktrojanowski and David Knight with the extreme reflex/deflex this bow is really mild. Some problems that I ran into however were... first, I deviated from my use of URAC185 and used Titebond, I like titebond but it doesn't fill gaps, after the glue set up I took it off the form and was horrified to see that I must have had more clamping pressure on one side than the other because one side had some gaps between the raw boo and the IPE. I thought about trying to pull it apart and reuse the IPE but instead I cut it out to shape on the bandsaw to see how deep the gaps went. luckily there were only a few spots that I decided to fill with some urac to fix. The handle on the bow is the one that I had laminated on the Boo trilam that I spoke of above that broke I really liked it and wanted to reuse it. it was a combination of black walnut, maple, osage and plum wood. The tip overlays are lignum vitae(bearing block) after tillering I found that for the first time in bow making that instead of coming in light I came in heavy, my scale stops at 50# this bow I'm guessing is at 65# I could have taken more off the belly but it would be getting thin, I also could have taken some off the sides but I decided to leave it, after shooting the bow I was pleased to find it shoots great. So Jon, you're gonna have to work those arms a little. One other problem that I noticed was one that I was warned about but thought I knew better, it was not using a power lam, I never used them in the boo trilams that I built in the past, never had a problem with the handle wanting to delam. I noticed after shooting it awhile that one fade had a gap, I decided to pack some glue in the gap and wrap the lower part of both fades with stretched rawhide, then wrapped that with crochet thread and titebond. It seems to have worked. I look at it as a trial, I'll learn for the next IPE boo bow that I make, and I guarantee there will be another. I hope Jon likes his bow, I have to send it to him yet, this will be the first he's seen of it. I wish I could make a bow for all the great friends I made at the classic but you know how that goes, I do have one more in process for someone classic related but that's yet to be completed.
Hope you enjoy the pics
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