Adam
That's why I said "or any other elastic wood".
Ipe is elastic. It's very hard to chrysal Ipe even with a Bamboo backing.
Steve (Badger) sent me a BBI glue up years ago that had fully 1/4" Bamboo on a 1" wide, 64" long ALB blank. What a nightmare to tiller and lateral stability was nowhere to be seen. The bow hardly lost any of the glued in reflex and had fantastic string tension The Bamboo put a lot of stress on that Ipe but it did not chrysal, in fact how often do you hear about chrysals in Ipe, and that tells me it is a very elastic wood.
I've just never considered ipe one of the more 'elastic' woods. Dense, heavy, very strong in compression yes... but elastic has never come to mind. Yew, on the other hand, is. It just wants to bend... it's just begging for it. You can feel it itching to bend.
I did a bit of digging on wood-database.com. Elastic Modulous (with the higher number meaning the less easily a wood will bend): EM of ipe 3,200,000 lbf/in2, EM of yew 1,320,000 lbf/in2, EM of osage 1,689,000 lbf/in2. Looks to me like ipe in about 3X harder to bend than yew. That's why I'm a bit confused by your statement.
Anyway, I don't want to be a dog with a bone. Thanks for your input, it's always appreciated! I saw your maple backed HHB recurve in another thread. Nice bow!