Black locust static recurve build along

[PEARL DRUMS]

Looking sweet, Kyle.

Talk about a "portable" work shop

[Mo_coon-catcher]

It's a bit floppy but awesomely portable.

Most of the deflex held when I popped the clamp off. About 1/2" pulled out putting the tips 1/4" infront of the handle. I got it clamped in the form for reflexing, nothing too extreme but it'll put the tips a solid inch infront of the handle. I'm going to heat treat this in place and hope it all holds. Then it's time to align the hooks.

Kyle

[Mo_coon-catcher]

Here it is after pulling it off the form. It held about 1" of total reflex after all the bending. I feel like that's a decent enough place to start. It has a light reflex deflex profile before hitting the hooks. And as for alignment I feel like one hook is pretty good, the other needs an alignment job. It looks like a simple heat and twist should pull it over. Once I get the hooks straightened out I'll put some overlays one so that I can make use of the full length of the limbs and have the go over the top of the limb.

Kyle

[Drewster]

Shaping up and looking good Kyle.  Looking forward to seeing more.

[Mo_coon-catcher]

It looks like the first go at alignment was pretty good. Looks straight enough to me to start cleaning up and smoothig out everything with some sanding, then it's time to put on a string. I'll do the micro alignments as I go and the wood tells me what it need for it to bend. I did a little bending on the floor, and it's very stiff still, I think there is a lot of scraping to do to get it down to weight.

Kyle

[FilipT]

So what is your procedure? You wrap foil, put it on steaming and then while its hot you bend it on jig and while bending you take heat gun to it to make heat constant or did I got something wrong?

[Mo_coon-catcher]

You've pretty much got it. I have everything ready to go while steaming, so as soon as it's hot enough I quickly slip the foil and rag off, slap the bow on the jig and start bending giving supplementary heat to keep it hot enough to keep moving. I need to make my recurring jig like I saw some on here have. Where they have a metal strap bolted to the form tht you slide the tip on te bow into and start cranking the bow around the curve instead of fighting to get that first clamp on before everything cools.

Kyle

[BowEd]

Cool...Sorry I did'nt chime in earlier but I was wondering when putting your deflex in did you do one side at a time with the heat gun?Looks pretty good so far for ya.

[FilipT]

Do you have some basic dimensions for the recurve jig? I have no luck finding those on the net, or even in TBB2

[Mo_coon-catcher]

When I reflexed I did both at once. I put a little tension on the limbs with the clamp then started heating both as evenly as I could by heating till the limb was hot to the touch then jump to the other limb to let the heat sink in. The. I'd incrementally crank down the clamp and heat some more and continued these two steps until I have the deflex I want. If one limb wants to bend easier than the other I add shims under the side that wants to drop quicker. This causes the bow to rotate and eventually even out the limbs.

For the jig, I didn't use any specific pattern or dimensions. I decided on what sort of radius I wanted and eyeballed a sketch into the 2x4. Once it looked good I bandsawed it out. I can get you measurements of your like.

Kyle

[PEARL DRUMS]

A quart paint can radius is a good start for statics. Not stepping on your toes, Kyle.

[Aaron H]

Nice looking hooks Kyle

[Mo_coon-catcher]

I got a bit more done last night. I cleaned up the bow a bit; sanded the edges smooth, cleaned up the cracks from bending with some super glue to fill them up and rasped them smooth, cleaned up the back a bit, and took a couple of scrapes off the belly to start dropping the weight a bit before I started making it bend again. I should have 3 successive posts to get all the pictures I took on here, and Ill describe what I did in each set.

The first picture shows my normal method of tillering using the reflection in the back glass of my truck and how loose the initial loose string is to get everything moving for the first time since all the bending. I just got the tree workable on the bow before this one, which was a totally different weight class than this one. So I stuck with my old method to get a feel for how the wood wanted to act and to be able to feel for any twisting or torquing motions while the limbs started to move. The first thing I noticed was that the bow that was pulling 30# at 10" was bow rediculously heavy. It took some serious effort to just make te limbs move. But I sid heat treat upping the weight, and essentially shortened the limbs by recurring, without taking a tape to it I would say the recurves shortened the limbs for the early draw stage by about 3-4" from what they were. So I took a couple of scrapings off each limb to start dropping the weight a bit. Before continuing with the mirror until I felt it had dropped to a reasonable weight to start taking a scale to it.
This set of pictures showed the limbs marked with pencil lead where I want to scrape, which for now I'm avoiding any scraping in the fade area to keep them under stressed until I go to get the last couple inches of draw out of it.
 The next picture shows the relative angle I hold the scraper to te bow belly to help reduce any wash boarding, I aim to keep it at about a 45* angle to the bow and will alternate it back and forth so the scraper is always taking wood at different angles. I also pushe the scraper from the tip into the handle, instead of pulling from handle to tip. This seems to help reduce or eliminate the little ledge that forms when the edge of the scraper goes through the softer early wood. Also by pushing I can put some serious weight into the scraper and take some heavy curls if I have a lot of wood to remove. 
In the last picture in feeling out for any thick or thin spots in the limb. I stopped for the picture in a thick spot. When I come to these while scraping I'll take a little more wood from these areas to help it alowt catch up to the rest of the limb. It might take a couple of scraping sessions for me to totally remove the thick spots. If I find a thjnk spot I'll mark it about so I won't touch there until it's evened out.

Kyle

[Mo_coon-catcher]

This next series is where I started to take it to the tree and scale. Which is the second time I've used a tree for tillering and will say that I'm getting to like them. The first bow I used a tree with was a heavy piece of osage I started a t MoJam, and just got to ahooting this last weekend, but that'll be in a post of its own knce I get done wth some touch ups.

The first pic shows one of the big benefits of using a bowyers loop for tillering. The hooks weren't perfectly straight inline with the handle and limbs, so I skewed the string over the the side it needed to be on the help the strjng stay put while I made the wood bend. The first couple of pictures are of the bows first time on the tree after a righ weight dropping on the mirror. The first is with the long string and just enough weigh put on to straighten everything out. The second is of me putting my goal weight of 50# into it. Which it's really not moving all that much. So I took scrapings off the limbs in sets of twos. Where I mark up the entire under side of the limbs and scrape the pencil off then do it again before going to the other side. The next picture is after about 4 of those sessions. It still didn't drop any serious weight, but enough that I was comfortable putting a low brace on it. The limbs weren't quite perfectly balanced but the bends looked pretty decent to me. Which helps a bunch by pre tillering while the limbs are still straight.

Kyle

[Mo_coon-catcher]

This last series of what I did last night is when I took it to a low brace of about 3.5" from string to back. Once braced you can see hooks are in line with each other, but not quite inline with the rest of it, so they skew to one side. But it's good enough for the string to stay put for some short draws where the string doesn't pull off the hooks yet. I'll be correcting that the next time I work on it. In addition to fully cleaning and removing the bending cracks and reinforcing with a belly strip of something, I'm not sure what yet but I'm leaning towards horn.
The last picture is me pulling it back to 50# right after bracing o see where everything is lining up and the even ness of the limbs. The left limb is a bit strong, so I'll be taking a set of scrapings from that limb o even them out before continuing further. Once I get it pulled back to about 22" of the tree I'll swap over to tillering by hand in the truck mirror again to get everthing evened out in hand.

Any input is welcome, whether questions, comments, or suggestions on how I'm going about
everything.

Kyle