Well, I apologize. I’m a bit lazy with posting pics of the process, but you will get a lot of the finished bow.
And of course I was in my shop, here’s a short cut of steps I did:
Recurves are steamed in.
Unfortunately they were not in line, missing angle about 30°. Also need for string alignment correction. I did these corrections all in one heating session.
Added reflex with dry heat.
I will wait a few days before tillering till the stave gets some humidity back. Time to chase a ring, an additional ring at the levers allows cutting the stringnock in the back and making the levers narrow.
Two days pause
The holes are carefully worked out. Not much width to play only little side work with the drawknife, carefully watching the grain and trying to get a bit of a taper outwards.
back upper limb
belly
back lower limb
belly
Depth: the knotholes shows particularly high crown on the back, I hollowed out the belly to get even thickness. First more or less even thickness along the limbs, then a few scrapes to get some taper. The further tillering is done in the middle of the belly, resulting in concave furrow. The developing two ridges give more stability (very narrow snakey stave).This is not a HLD bow, the belly don’t flatten out when the bow is drawn. This is only a different way of tillering the depth taper for more stability (twisting) and matching more with deep valleys at the knotholes.
I had another problem. I got that thing to brace. While drawing (est. about 16”) I heard the ‘tic’. Immediately unbracing and examining the back and the belly brought no visible cracks or injuries. I braced it again, drew it again to 16” - nothing happened. Continued drawing out to about 20” and I heard the second ‘tic’. Now I saw two lengthwise cracks at the waist (lower limb).
Obviously here is too much twisting stress concentrated. Perhaps I have too much spin induced at that wavy grain area while the first untwisting phase and the wood / grain wants now go back in the original shape.
This is what I did:
Filled the crack with thin super glue, wrapped with a soaked strong linen yarn, and coated the wet wrapping with TBIII. She has got a nice corsage at her waist.
Next continued tillering, only a few scrapes more and I call it done. Tiller looks perhaps a bit ugly, I left some spots more or less stiff (knotholes).
The levers got a filed in string groove and a natural overlay (additional ring) for string nock on the back. That overlay is feathering out at the kink of the lever.
The handle turned out very narrow, only ¾ “. I glued on a riser block from a contrasting exotic wood called clavellin. For more comfort a piece of leather, thinned out at the edges, was added. I got the pattern on the leather by accident, I clamped the wet leather with textile rubber band to the handle to get the form – that's was it. Always looking for new solutions, this handle fits super nice in my palm.
I gave it sharp steep fades to save length for bending portions.
