With all this talk about thin rings I'm going to start looking at some different trees to cut next year. I usually try to go after the ones I think will have thicker rings. I wouldn't mind making a few bows with yewish rings and see how they perform.
Yewish bows? How do you do that? I suppose you just take the tips off?
I prefer thicker onion rings and thinner osage rings. When I first started making bows, my mentor chanted over and over how much tight ringed wood was for making bows. Then a while back, folks started talking about thicker rings being so much easier to work with as long as you had great early wood to late wood ratios.
I fall into the camp with my opinion that thicker rings are necessarily less dense rings. I am getting good enough at chasing rings after 12 years that I don't worry about chasing down to a thick ring for safety.
Someone mentioned that they don't get all worked up over what the rings might or might not be, they just make a bow. That's a good attitude, work with the wood you got, with what tools you have, and the brains the good Lord gave you. And for future bows, when I have thicker rings, I will make the bow a tad wider and if they are stacked in there like leaves of rolling paper I will make a skinnier bow!
