Someone who has been selected to appear on the reality show Alone contacted me recently. As he said, "I have one slot left to fill and it was either a shovel or a bow", he went with a bow. He wanted to know what would work, seems like Vancouver Island is where they film this show. I told him something simple using a wood that resists moisture, I gave him my reasons which are irrelevant here. The species I suggested, all from NA, were Yew, Osage and ERC, in that order and the design is one I have found to be quite effective, mostly native inspired. He has tentatively picked Yew but it did get me to thinking about the ERC and how it would behave with the design I picked. It turns out that it does quite well.
The bow is made from 3/8" ERC boards, I think they are used mostly for chests. Being a board they had to be backed and I used Maple for that. I sort of figured that being only 3/8" think that I would need a slightly thicker backing to get the draw weight up a bit so the backing is just over 1/8" think at the center. I also glued in a thin power lam extending past the handle area. The boards were only 4' long so I cut 1 in half then used a tapered finger joint to splice the 2 pieces together. The small recurves were steam bent and the reflex glued in. Final specs are 61" long overall with 1 1/2" wide limbs. The draw weight ended up at 47# @ 28", I was hoping for over 50# but I would have needed to make the bow shorter for that of added more thickness to the inner limbs, extending the power lam might have done it. I glued in 5" of reflex and it kept close to 4" of that, so far. I shot it a few times and for a 47# bow it spits out 550 grain arrows at an impressive speed. The humidity in my shop while I was making the bow stayed at around 70%, I'm sure that Vancouver Island has that beat. Here are some pics
The first pic is the backing being glued down and after removal from the form.
