"Except, all over this site is the advice that the strong side is the side that's farther away from the string."
Absolutely not. It is the other way around.
Ryan is correct. You got confused. Happens to the best of us.
Weak side is farthest away from the string in a strung bow. Remove wood from the other side.
I believe you misspoke here. I'm going to quote you from a couple other threads.
The bow twists towards the weak side. The weaker side is the one closest to the string in the braced bow. Strong side is furthest.
and
Like Ad said remove wood from the highest side or where the distance from string to bow is the greatest.
Weak close, strong far, same as I said. I've seen you say it several times more too that I won't bother to quote. You're always consistent about it, except here. Not trying to be argumentative, really just trying to get to the bottom of this.
It was even said here in this thread.
You fell into the trap of removing wood from the weak side. The side that leans toward you is weak, this causes it to bend farther. You need to remove wood from the side bending away from you since it’s bending less than the other side.
Ryan, when you say "toward you" I take you to mean like if you're holding the bow in shooting position looking at the belly. If so, that is just another statement of weak close, strong far. Right?
And to everyone pointing me to 4est Trekker's stickied thread "The Mechanics of Limb Twisting Explained", yes, that is the first thread I linked to in my original post. I've read it and feel I understand it and it seems to support me taking wood off the side that I did.
But this is getting extra convoluted because there is contradictory advice happening here. Can anyone see what I was trying to illustrate with these pictures?
This is 4est's advice in the stickied thread. This is also the advice Mo_coon-catcher gave me in this thread. This is the advice I followed.
This is the "weak close, strong far" advice. The advice Ryan gave me in this thread (if I'm understanding you right). This is the advice I did not follow.
To be clear, both of those are the same photo.
4est's thread talks about lateral bend off of an imagined ideal center line. The "weak close, strong far" advice talks about what I would call the actual twist. Two different effects which are closely related and both usually the result of a weak side. My bow seems to be unusual in that the lateral bend and the twist are suggesting different sides are the strong side, as illustrated by those two pictures.
I'm very open to being wrong here, in fact I would welcome the clarity. This just remains my understanding. If I'm interpreting people's advice wrong in those 2 pics, I would love to know how.
If you closely watch my gif of the limbs progress, near the handle you can actually see the belly wood being reduced. Notably you can see the moment I made it all the way through the jatoba and hit maple in picture 5. Removing wood from that side is different from what 4est's thread suggests? I'm struggling to see how.
You definitely took it off the wrong side. The appearance of the twist decreasing is likely just your brace height increasing and hiding it. The actual angle of the limb tip looks the same or worse.
I absolutely agree that the amount the tip is rotated is the same or worse. But I'm less sure that the decrease in the lateral bend of the limb is an illusion. When bending the bow from unstrung to braced, the lateral bend of the limb increased. And it increased further the more I drew the bow. That is to say, the string became more out of line with the handle the more I drew the bow. You're suggesting that after a point, that trend would reverse? And the more the bow bent the more in line things would become? That also suggests that taking wood off the wrong side to such an extreme degree
didn't make the bow worse, just because of a few inches of extra brace height? That strikes me as unlikely. The limb moving in the right direction despite the increase in brace height I took as more evidence that it was moving in the right direction. But I still have the bow, so when I get a chance I can test your theory. I can just put a longer string on it and check to see if it's insanity bad at a lower brace height.
Everyone giving me a simple "you took wood off the wrong side" has to contend with the fact that my extreme measures didn't make the limb alignment problem worse. I think it's pretty clear that there are more interesting things going on here.
I'm no expert, but my intuition's telling me that the tree your corewood (board) was cut from had some major twist to it. The more you tillered the bow, the more it began to show itself.
Perhaps this is assumed and obvious, but in my experience you can remove wood from the "correct" side all you want, but unless you fix the twist with heat, things will never work out.
This is my leading theory at the moment too. But do you fix with heat even when the unstrung bow is straight? So that would involve taking a straight stick and inducing twist?
Edit: I went ahead and tried a longer string. My suspicions were correct, the heightened brace height wasn't misleading. The bow looks more in line than ever at a lower brace height. Here's the first 'before' pic I took vs the 'after' pic I just took. You can see where I removed wood too. (Sorry, different day, different lighting)
The side I took wood off of definitely helped to bring the limb in line. So if I had taken wood off the other side, as per many suggestions here, it would have gotten more out of line. Right?
