hickory holmegaard

[cutty]

would hickory be a poor choice to attempt a holmegaard?

[Stick Bender]

Hickory would be a good choice for leaver type bow with the right design plus hickory really shines with heat treating !

[cutty]

How many out there have made a holmegaard that did not fail? This will be my first attempt.
My biggest concern is where the inner limb steps down to the outer non bending lever limb. Do you make this fade thickness taper from the even parallel thickness of the inner limbs? Inner limbs are even parallel thickness throughout their length than width tapers to 1".
Inner limbs will be thinner then outers and do all the bending, they will be 2" wide.
I don't know what i'm getting at?   Any help would be appreciated.
 

[ksnow]

Not to be nit picky, but it sounds like you are after a Mollegabet design, not a Holmegaard design. The original Bowyer's Bibles created a LOT of confusion by lumping these two designs together.  There are at least a dozen existing bows of the Holmegaard type, and only one limb on one bow shows any step, and that one is minimal. There are two Mollegabet type bows existing, and they both have the pronounced limb to lever transition. Sorry, soap box rant over. No offense intended at all.

As to your question, hickory will work, be sure to keep it dry and heat treat it well. Good luck, there have been many successful bows made of that design. If you are truly interested in a Holmegaard design, then hickory is a fine choice. Again, keep it dry and heat treat the belly.

Kyle

[Springbuck]

  Hickory is great for this design.  Don't get too attached to what the thickness is supposed to be.   It may or may not be a consistent thickness.  That's just a starting point.  Just realize the levers have to be a bit thicker than the inner limbs.   And,  like the fadeouts of a handle in reverse, where the shoulders narrow, the thickness steps up. 

When I rough out these bows, I do the front profile first, leaving a little margine (like, the tips especially will be much narrower and lighter when finished).  I do something like make the whole thing about 3/4" thick and THEN work down the thickness of the inner limbs ONLY while I floor tiller or begin on the tiller tree.

As I get the thing bending, it'll be 1/2" thick or less, and the 3/4" thickness will be PLENTY for the levers.  When you are tillered out to half draw or so, you can see what of the levers you can shed for weight.    I've seen a lot of these made with levers twice as thick as limbs, and you really only need about 25% thicker.   But, let the bow tell you.

[cutty]

I am confused some now. Can someone post a few pics of both the holmegaard and the mollegabet.
Back and side profile. Can these designs be meshed together?

[willie]

not sure of the spelling

[GlisGlis]

the holmgaard is almost a piramid bow
only exception is limb section that is elliptical

mollegabet is a lever bow with a stiff part of the limb

[bushboy]

Here's a holmegaard\mollegebet hybrid that I'm working on.

[Springbuck]

 These are the Mollegabet style.  Everyone calls them Holmegaard because the misnomer got widespread out there on the Web,  etc.  before the correction was made by those who know.  I, and almost everybody on this site and paleoplanet.net, and stickbow.com had to change our ideas and about these bows, and the names we used, at one point.  It's just still  common "out there" to see them mixed up.  The pronounced shoulders and narrow, deep outer limb levers belong to the Mollegabet.

 

Can these designs be meshed together?

  Yes.  The first TBB had a some bad info from previous sources about the Holmegaard, but later volumes corrected it.  However, Baker was already refining the TILLER in his experiments and replicas.  One thing about it is that REPLICAS made faithful to the best measurements of the actual Holmegaard artifact TILLER OUT with more inner limbs bending and stiffer outer limbs than other flatbows.   So, that part is right.  The two bows BEND a lot the same, sharing common feature of the side profile both strung and drawn. 

If we buy the dogma that side profile should correspond to front profile, the Mollie's front profile is a better execution of the style.  The Holmie has the width to handle that inner limb bend, but more mass than needed where the outer limbs bend less.  Given it's width measurements, the Holmegaaard maybe should have had more elliptical tiller, but it was still a well made bow.