Board bow question

[Weylin]

Hey all,

I'm starting a red oak, bend in the handle board bow. it is 69" long, 1.5" wide and is currently 3/4" thick. I intend it to pull 50-55# at 27". I have it in the shape that I want and I am ready to start taking weight off and floor tillering it but before I do that I am wondering to what extent I should taper the thickness. I dont want to take too much off before I start tillering and accidentally end up with a kiddie-bow but I feel like there is still a fair bit of wood to take off before I can really start tillering. given the dimensions of the wood and desired weight are there some safe but reasonable measurements that I should shoot for at the handle vs. the tips before I start fine tuning? Thanks in advance...

Weylin

[DarkSoul]

3/4" at the handle, tapered to 5/8" at the tips.
What does the front profile look like? Is it a straight taper from handle to tips?

Start by floor tillering the board. It should be (way) too stiff initially. Scrape off some wood of the belly and check the bend again in floor tillering. Keep track of how much wood you remove: remove wood evenly from both limbs. Avoid gaps and hills. Check thickness in both limbs. Check bend again. Scrape wood. Etc. until bendy enough to string it, or switch to a long string.

[Weylin]

Thanks for the help DarkSoul. The front profile is as follows: the 4" long handle is narrowed down to 1 1/4" width and widens back out to 1 1/2" over 3". then, from the tips,which are 3/4" wide, it widens back to 1 1/2" over 12". Hope that makes sense. I confused myself a bit while I was writing it.  The main thing I was after was the 3/4" at the handle to 5/8" at the tip, so if you still think that is a good place to start from given the front profile I will go ahead and start hoggin' off some wood.

[George Tsoukalas]

There's a red oak   buildalong on my site.
http://georgeandjoni.home.comcast.net/~georgeandjoni/