What do you fill those knots with?
Small straight knots I peg with a piece of fine grained Yew which I turn in my drill press (glued in with epoxy).
For bigger irregular holes, especially ones which don't go right through, like the one near the tip.
I make a peg (Yew) as good a fit as I can, I then mix epoxy and Yew dust (collected from the bandsaw) into a fairly dry paste (it seems to get wetter as you press it in). I load some mix into the hole and press in the peg clamping it gently in the vice. Where a knot is sound on one side it often has the tiny central pith showing, by drilling through that with a V small drill into the cavity it allows excess mix to squeeze out and ensures that there are no air pockets.
For really big irregular holes, I've filled with epoxy Yew mix to provide a foundation and then drilled clean round holes and fitted round plugs.
This was V effective on the 90# warbow, where I filled a big squareish hole and did 4 round plugs eventually leaving a filling of almost solid wood with most of the mix drilled out.
It seems to be a pretty good technique, but I've only done it with Yew so far.
You can see, it would be impossible to drill clean holes without filling first.
Del
