From lurker to red oak board groan-along.

[mrkinsey]

here here! 

I gotta go with radius, mangeur de lard is one heck of a name.

[zenmonkeyman]

Back again.  When we left off, I was having some problems with propeller twist.  I was pretty sure I knew how to fix it.  I was wrong.  I scraped off one side.  It got worse.  I scraped off the other side.  It got better.  I scraped more off that side.  It got worse.  WTF!  I now believe that a weak side near the handle will pull the whole limb toward it, which naturally produces a twist.  But somewhere towards the nock, the compression is more perpendicular than longitudinal, so a weak side tends to twist the tips in the opposite direction.  This means that to fix a twist it may be necessary to scrape one side near the handle and the other side near the nock.  Anyways, with my trial and error messing around, I ended up stuck with this.



Oh, and while I was obsessing about twist, the tiller went all to hell on me, and my 45-48# bow became 40# @ 29".  And not in a pretty fashion!



So, figuring I'm not too much to look at anyways, I thought I'd risk drawing the beast myself.



And then I checked the string follow.



Pretty ghastly.

So now I have a bow with some mistakes, I'm wondering about experimenting with some fixes.  I'm thinking again about heat treating the belly some, and backing with silk to compensate for the increased tension.  That would gain me some of my draw weight back again.  I'm not sure if there's much I can do about the propeller twist though.  I don't suppose a little recurve would help any?  I may as well go double or nothing on this project, there's no sense in limiting myself to what I've got when there's so much more to learn!  Any advice you guys have for moving forward is greatly appreciated. 

[OldBow]

This is off to a very good start. Be sure to give me a "heads up" when you decide its finished and then it will be entered into BOM fun.

[makenzie71]

The twist in the limb when drawn just makes me go ewwww...but sometimes stuff like that turn out to be pure aesthetic.  Performance is the bottom line, to me.

I wouldn't worry about that much follow...2.5" isn't a whole lot.  While I believe it has some drawbacks, I've reduced my set on two of my old red oak bows by clamping them down in a brace and tempering the belly with a blow torch.  I just oiled the lumber (miniral oil), let it soak for just a moment, then I held the torch in one area long enough to just start browning the wood.  About an hour of this and my 70lb longbow was set free...my 50lb bow went into reflex, actually.