braided leather bowgrip

[oneeye]

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Start with a piece of paper to get your pattern for your leather. I use leather approx. 3/32" thick.
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for a pistol grip your pattern will look close to this 4 1/4" tall by 4 3/4" wide at top  5 1/2" wide at bottom.  add about an 1/8" all around pattern and cut leather to shape, then soak in warm water.
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apply leather to bow handle and wrap tightly with cord.  (you will need at least 16 feet of cord.I use lawn mower pull start cord because it has a nice braided pattern.) let dry approx. 48 hrs
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take your chord off and you will be left with an embossed piece of leather. mark leather in center of limb and trim one side then do the other. I like to soak it then wrap it again to get a perfect fit it should be just a bit small  by about 1/8" to give a nice tight fit.

[oneeye]

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trim leather 1/16" below shelf and bottom of grip. the braid will cover this space. Mark 1/8" inside all edges and punch 1/8" slits all around (punch slits at 45 angle at corners) leaving 1/8" between slits.
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should look like this when done. use a punch and widen all slits a bit, makes lacing easier. 
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place around handle and tie in with artificial sinew. There will be 3 different braided sections each one will use approx 9x the length to be braided of 1/8" leather lace.  rub the lace down with leather conditioner and put in bag (overnight), it will make it nice and soft and you shouldn't have to worry about breakage.

[oneeye]

You may want to look up double loop lacing for the next step. here's how it goes for a right handed bow as we want the lacing to lay towards the back of the bow on the arrow rest side. Reverse everything if your a lefty. Start on the opposite side of arrow rest mid way.
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continue this pattern all the way around until you get to this point.

[Pat B]

This is very interesting Rich. I love the pressed pattern in the leather.

[oneeye]

 Once again you may want to look up double loop lacing. 
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pull the end of the lace out until it looks like this, being careful to maintain the loop and leaving one empty slit.

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Continue lacing as normal then feed lace through loop as shown

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Lace back under the bight not pulling to tight and cross over your lace pushing needle down through both the loop and going through the slit with 2 laces in it. Tighten and even things up making everything appear equally spaced. You will need to run the needle under a few stiches of lace with both ends. Disregard the lace in the background, thats the next step. 

[medicinewheel]

WOW, this is fantastic!
Thanks for sharing!

[HoBow]

Nice!  I know they style of my next bow grip 

[Josh]

Awesome been looking forward to this...    Thanks for the detailed explanation! 

[HatchA]

Thanks for this Oneeye...  Much appreciated!

Steve.

Maybe this should be stickied or whatever you do to give it a place of importance..?  Would save me copying and pasting all the pic's to my hard drive   hehe

[bowkee]

Thanks ,Been Waiting for this

[oneeye]

Your all very welcome but .....We still have another step to go    Hope it doesn't look to complicated its rather easy once you get going.  It's much easier to learn using illustrations than pictures but everything I have is copyriight protected.     I'll get the rest posted soon.   Scott

ps .  next step applique lacing for the front.

[oneeye]

This time you may want to look up applique lacing. First we need to fill up some space between braids with lace and if anyone has a better idea than this please let me know. I normally just lace where I think it looks the best.
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lace through the upper 2 corner slits then come back around and go through them again.

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slide your needle through a lower lace and upper lace as shown and pull snug but not tight.

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place the needle back under the lace and back through the right corner slit and tighten everything up. (use an awl, you will break less lace) our starting point for the applique lacing needs to be in the upper right slit and this is the only way I could figure out how to fill the space up with lacing. The rest is cake !!

[oneeye]

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continue these last three steps to the bottom of the grip.

[JW_Halverson]

Amazing!  That is beautiful work, thank you for sharing it with us.  You did a great job in photographing the details so that dummies like me can "read the pictures". 

Just one question.  Could you wait until the lacing was done, then wet the leather thoroughly and wrap tightly with the cord to achieve the embossing?

Man, I got this one bookmarked for future reference!

[Barrage]

Thanks for posting, that's a great idea how you embossed it.

One question - what kind of a needle is that?  The lacing just fits right in the end?  Never seen that before.  Looks convenient.