Making laminated bows with hide (or sinew) glue?

[Eric Garza]

Has anyone ever made an all-wood laminated bow using hide or sinew glue as the sole adhesive? How did that work?

[WillS]

I know somebody who made a Saami bow using compression pine on the belly, with birch glued as a backing using hide glue.  It ended up at 150lb so I'd imagine if done right hide glue alone should be absolutely fine.

[jaxenro]

I understood the main reason woodworkers use hide glue is for joins they want to be able to take apart. I'm sure it would work but aren't there better choices?

[PatM]

It's obviously more than adequate, people just don't find it as user friendly it seems. You need to re-heat the whole lamination to re-liquefy any sort of collagen glue that gels rapidly.

[mikekeswick]

Yes it would work perfectly well. Once sealed there are no real issues with moisture...obviously you wouldn't leave it out for days in the rain but storing it inside when not shooting would be sufficient.
If you used fish bladder glue it resists moisture ingress much better than hide/sinew glue. It also gels slowly so clamping your lams would be ok. Doing many thin coats with drying inbetween then a thick coat with all the parts heated would work very well.

[Marc St Louis]

The Ash backing on this HHB  RD take-down was glued down with hide glue, from what I remember it was quite a chore.  The end result was quite good though and it was getting excellent performance with 10 GPP arrows

[stuckinthemud]

heating the wood before applying the glue makes a huge difference

[Carson (CMB)]

Gret topic. I have been wanting to do just that with some bamboo backed glue-ups. Good to get some votes of confidence for the old hide glue!

My thoughts were that with water clean up, low cost, and lack of VOCs it would be good choice over some of the modern stuff, and then after thinking on sheer forces acting on glue-lines in a tri-lam limb and the elastic nature of hideglue might it not be a better choice in terms of performance too?

[loon]

I know somebody who made a Saami bow using compression pine on the belly, with birch glued as a backing using hide glue.  It ended up at 150lb so I'd imagine if done right hide glue alone should be absolutely fine.

do want to see.. That's one kind of bow I dream of making