WG, again, I don't want to sound like I have all this experience with OS or anything else, other than I've spent the last six months working diligently with OS in everyway and before that I made a half dozen bows, some being kid bows. I abandoned my OS longbow tradebow because of pin knots simply because I don't want to take any chances. I laterally wrapped those pins in 5 different places, with sinew, and I have no fear that the bow will never break.
I've never broke an actual bow that I felt was safe. I've never broke an OS bow or stave. I've only done some extreme bending tests, with billet type material, where splinters lifted in tension or extreme heat or quick drying caused pin knots to open or grain cracks to open. I fill them with superglue and ignore them, normally, or I laminate over them or back the bow or whatever. The only actual bow that I've I had a problem with was a rawhide backed OS longbow that lifted a splinter at a pin when the rawhide popped off in that exact spot. I would have had no problem laying that splinter down and rebacking it but instead I threw it in the fire.
I have a takedown molle OS bow that is decrowned and rawhide backed and it takes quite a bend and has been shot quite a bit and has no prolbems despite the pins.
But my point about the pins being weakness is that my bending test showed that cracks USUALLY develop at the pins first, sometimes quickly, long before the roughed up wood that is under tension begins to lift a splinter. And during the bending or, later, during the shooting, pins that are close enough together will share a crack. IF you try to work down through that crack you'll see it can go deep or that it will reappear during subsquent shooting.
The bottom line is that the pins are a weakness, just like any defect or knot or bug damage or rot is a weakness in any wood. I welcome that as it just makes the challenge to develop a successful bow even greater.
But as Carson said, in retrospect I might just let some of those defects alone and pretend they don't exist. For me it depends on the stress level in that area of the limb or whether I'm going to be 5 miles back in a wilderness on a the trip of a lifetime elk hunt.
So the bottom line is, I don't know. I'm just sharing my experience and thoughts. Its hard to argue with someone who has a violated bow that has shot 2000 arrows without issue. I'd rather not consider that the norm and instead go with the obvious--that pins break open in tension quicker than the wood, and then deal with them accordingly.
The defects in your pics are not as familiar to me. I'm a little concerned about the fish/football shaped ones. I can't really tell what is going on there.
We all need to break a few OS bows to really know.
