Thank you for the compliments guys, and i hope your all having a good weekend. The best part of mine was presenting "Dragon Bow" to its new owner, Kate at her birthday party last night. You see, my buddy asked me to build a bow for his girlfriend. Considering the time constraint involved, i had to re-purpose one that i had already been working on for some time. She had seen my bows before and liked that i was experimenting with Sturgeon skin. He told me her favorite color was Teal, so i started on the artwork and added the scales when i realized it was to resemble a Dragon. She happens to like Dragons too, and we are hoping it will turn some heads at Renaissance fairs and such.
As for handshock, its quite minimal to non existent IMO. You can feel it bend through the handle, and it is not as docile as say a stiff handle bow, but nothing uncomfortable at all, nothing i would refer to as shock or even jumpy in the hand. You might remember a bow of similar shape i did a while back, black with white stripes and viking runes, that one was a bit more jumpy in the hand. I am up for advice on tillering these types of bows in the future, since i clearly like this shape. I am not sure how removing more material in the reflexed sections of the limb and outer portions will affect things, will that encourage set in the reflexed area and loose the reflex? Do we tiller reflex/deflex bows like this to have no reflex left in the curves at full draw, thus drawing them to an elliptical like profile? Im always learning from you guys, feel free to advise.
More on how it shoots...this bow is thick and has a ton of sinew, rawhide, sturgeon, and thick antler tips...its fairly heavy in mass weight. I also realize one of the benefits of sinew is to allow drawing a short bow further than normal to realize its full benefits. But i wanted a low to mid 40# bow at 23" so thats where i stopped. Heres the part that gets me. When i hold this bow at draw for a second or two it goes 133fps with a 520 grain arrow, not super impressive. However when i draw back and release, "snap shoot" or whatever you want to call it i get 145-147 every time. Im drawing it back to the exact same place as far as i can tell and confirmed this result time and time again. I realize that all-wood bows loose weight as their held back at draw(seen this phenomenon first hand on my tillering scale). But to this extent struck me as odd. It went from being a bit slouchy to quite a shooter, so long as you draw and release immediately.
