Questions About Bamboo Backed Hickory?

[joachimM]

I was referring to the people who offer concrete advice like it is the gospel but with no actual experience, real common here.

I don't mean to be disrespectful, but allow me to disagree nevertheless on the question whether or not everyone without first-hand experience should stay shut.
The greatest advance in human culture was the invention of the script. Suddenly, being able to read meant you could gain information (=second-hand experience) from people you never met, and who may have lived hundreds of years before you. What's more, we live in an era of global communication. We also have access to all that information. All of us have learned to make bows by reading what others wrote, virtually none of us invented any aspect of bow making from scratch. This forum is the proof that second-hand experience is worth an awful lot.

I have never made a bamboo-backed hickory bow. I don't need to make one to know that it can make a great bow. Others have made great BBH, and have explained how, why and have the proof to show it. Others have studied in depth what bow designs are required to make good BBH. I'm merely transferring that information. I don't need the actual first hand experience to transfer this information, without it becoming less reliable. Even if I had made ten of them, that limited experience would be worth less to answer the question "can you make good BBH?" than all the combined experience on thousands of bows made by others, and recorded in writings.
That's the power of the written word.

And if that information came from the Traditional bowyer's bible, we can consider it "the gospel"  on this forum, no?  

[Eric Krewson]

Once I learned the bow making craft from experience and a lot of failures I was surprised at all the misinformation in the TBB series, some of the information in print is blatantly false from my experience. I call it fluff to fill pages.

Because the bow making world is so full of old wives tales and and misinformation I think we should pass on our actual experiences, not something we read and think is correct. This forum will be a much more reliable source of factual information if we do so.

This isn't bow making but an example of how quickly bad information spreads; On one of the M/L boards a guy is singing the praises of a gun cleaning product called Gunzilla. 5 or 6 guys chime in and say it is the best product to ever come out for cleaning a black powder gun, it gets everything, black powder residue, copper and lead and has no water in it so it won't ever cause rust.

I bought some and put it to the test; it gave the appearance of doing a mighty fine job, that is until I put my bore camera down the barrel. It looked like a coal mine in my barrel, black gunk I could get out in one pass with water was clinging to the rifling and breech plug.

I bet Gunzilla sold thousands of bottles from that one post. I bought into the myth, it wasn't until I had some actual experience that I found out it was bunk.

I bet the guys singing its praises don't have a bore camera.

My point is; actual experience trumps the written word by a mile.


 

[PatM]

   Are those pieces of info in TTBB based on the experience of another person?

 Keep in mind you are passing on your experience through written word.
 
 
   For every bowmaking  "fact" passed on by anybody, some will fail and some will succeed. So what you found false another might find true.

And yes, errors in TTBB do exist and have been acknowledged by the authors and readers.

[bushboy]

Well.i guess I don't have the bow building experience enough to dispel other people's insight as pure fabrication .

[KS51]

FWIW  I have made several BBH's  (after a number of failures).  What I found to work is gluing in abuout 2-1/2 to 3 inches of reflex, trap the back so that it is roughly 60%-70% the width of the belly.  I typically was shooting for a 45-50# bow and made them 63"-65" NTN.  Basically a shortened stiff handle about 7" fade to fade, 1-5/8 to 1-7/8 wide for the first 8-10 inches then taper down to 1/2" with about 5-6" straight tips.  The bows were tillered per Badger's mass method and never drawn past desired poundage.  Typically they all ended up with about 1/2" to 1" of reflex left.  I did make sure that I had both parts of the bow rough shaped and within about 1/16"-3/32" of finished dimensions before gluing up.  (This doesn't include the trapping which I found about impossible to do before gluing).  Also, as best as I could estimate, he Hickory that I used had an SG of .7 or better and flat sawn worked much better than quarter sawn.

Ken

PS - I typically tillered to 30" draw since I pull 29"+