Understanding hand shock???

[Buckeye Guy]

Generally speaking the only thing that will give a bow, by itself, excessive hand shock is too much outer limb mass.  The worse offender is having the inner limbs doing all the work and the outer limbs stiff and unbending.  When the string slams back home any energy that remains in the bow will travel down the limbs making them bow outwards.  If most of the limb is working then this remaining energy will be distributed throughout the limb with very little handle movement.  If the only part of the limbs that are actually working is near the handle then this will concentrate the remaining energy in that area and tend to make the handle bounce back and forth in your hand.

Limb timing has been talked about before but this is very ambiguous.  Unless your bow making skills are very pour you should be able to easily tell whether one outer limb has more mass than the other and that is one of the very few things, if not the only thing, that can actually affect limb timing. The other thing that may affect limb timing is having one limb much stronger than the other and this is also something that is very noticeable, this one is very iffy though as a stronger limb would have more mass which would tend to slow down it's return making it pretty well the same as the weaker limb.

Thats why you get paid the big bucks !!
I do not know what some of those words are but ,I think you are correct Marc !!!
No one has proved to me that(Limb timing) even matters ,If there is such a thing .
Keep it simple
Keep it fun !!
Guy

[Badger]

  I think their may be two kinds of limb timing. If one limb is faster than the other limb the slower limb will just hold back the faster one and they will still finish at the same time. But I do believe in timing within the same limb and how it unfolds. I believe a limb tip can finish before the inner limb.

[Marc St Louis]

Good point Steve but that would necessitate that the one limb have a different tiller shape than the other and that would be noticeable.

[coaster500]

Thanks guys for your comments...  looks to me that there are several issues to address that "Might" cause the shock. I am going to address the mass issue on this bow, as it seem to be the most obvious. I will post my results.

[Badger]

  In another thread I posted on how I used the tillering gizmo to lower the draw weight on several bows just because I was in a hurry. Besides a significant drop in performance they all picked up a bit of handshock, not all that bad but noticeable. None of these bows were thick in the outer limbs, most of them had the last 12" narrowed down pretty good. I blamed the circular tiller of the inner and mid limb, outer limb is stiff.

[Whitebeam]

  In another thread I posted on how I used the tillering gizmo to lower the draw weight on several bows just because I was in a hurry. Besides a significant drop in performance they all picked up a bit of handshock, not all that bad but noticeable. None of these bows were thick in the outer limbs, most of them had the last 12" narrowed down pretty good. I blamed the circular tiller of the inner and mid limb, outer limb is stiff.

What is the front profile of the now shocky bows? Is this a case of the circular tiller brought about by the use of the gizmo imposed on a parallel limbed bow causing parts of the limb to move at different rates as speculated above? We need someone to now invent a gizmo that gets shorter the nearer you get to the end of the limb ;-)

Peter