Cowboy, Ryano is the expert on this...and hopefully he'll reply this afternoon. I agree with Pat about using dry heat to remove the propellar. It is manditory that those tips are inline with each other to the best of your ability, so it may take several tweaking sessions to get them in line. To begin with leave your tips wide, allows you some flexibility during tillering to cut your string grooves deeper to one side if need be to line up. If you can use the same form you used when steaming, you might can do some tweaking with the dry heat and shimming with a wedge shaped shim to rotate the limb in the desired direction instead of holding by hand. Just be careful of sharp edges on any shim you use as it can dig into the back of your bow. Don't over tighten the clamp...getting the wood rotated where you want is enough, no need to over tighten.
How long did you steam the wood, might have come into play with the checking on the back. Also how long had the wood been seasoned? Believe it or not, steaming actually removes moisture from the wood instead of the opposite, that's why it causes checking. I think a highly seasoned stave would be more likely to check then a stave with a higher moisture content.
Getting that sucker tillered to brace involves putting it in a vise and bending one limb at a time with both hands on the tips. Try to get the limbs bending even as possible and the outer 1/3 of the limb just beginning to open up some. When you put the bow in a tillering tree saddle, you'll have to either clamp it or tie into place to keep it from rotating if still on the long string. Just some info I've learned, hopefully it will help you get started. Again Ryan, Marc and Sawfiler are three who have made exception recurves that I've seen. I'm sure there are others, they just don't come to mind right now.
