Hey guys,
I finished this bow in December of 2018. I started working on this stave a couple of years ago but then I stopped working on it in favor of something else. The stave was a hickory 1x2". It didn't have the greatest grain and when I first bought it I thought I could get an unbacked bow out of it if I cut off the part where the rings went off the end of the board drastically. After looking at it again later, I realized the rings still weren't running that straight and I decided it would have to be backed. After a back injury in February of 2018 caused me to lose the strength to pull most of the bows I owned and I had to resort to shooting lightweight bows until I strengthen those muscles to the point where I can pull my old bows, I have been making lightweight bows since, and I found a use for this stave that I had put aside before. Because of a habit of mine when I first started building bows of trying to do too much with a drawknife and tear off chunks of grain when I was too close to the marks I drew out for the bow's outline, there were gashes in the sides of the stave where my drawknife pulled chunks of wood out too close to the marks, so I had to make it even narrower than I had made it before, this time doing it more carefully with a Japanese saw rasp. When I got the sides smooth and equal, the bow was 3/4 of an inch wide at its widest point, the grip area, and the tips were about 3/8" wide. I decided to not back it right away because I feared that I would have string alignment issues with such a narrow bow, a problem I had a bow I was making before this. Eventually my fears where realized and I attempted to steam the handle to get the string to go towards the center of the stave more than it was twice but the adjustments I made weren't staying. The third time I tried using dry heat via heat gun and then bending the handle over my knee and that time it worked, the adjustment stayed. I shortened the bow once because I ran out of wood to make nocks at one point I believe but the stave was 62" long before I even took a drawknife to it in the first place. Once I got to the full brace stage of tillering, I then backed the bow with the bark of a wild cherry tree I bought from Echo Archery a few years ago. The bow is a D-bow that is 59" tip to tip, 3/4" wide at its widest point, and pulls 18#@29". The string is an endless string made from linen that I made for a different bow earlier but made it too long and it fit this bow, so it became this bow's string. The grip is polished hemp string wrapped around the grip area and then saturated with wood glue. I stained the parts that weren't covered by a cherry back backing with a few coats of alcohol based stain. This stain is not very potent, for a lack of a better word, it doesn't a lot of depth, it takes a lot of coats to reach a deep color but one of its advantages is it dries fast. For a finish, I used 3 coats of polyurethane. I named the bow 'Shika' after a character from the manga/anime Naruto who's name is Shikamaru. In the manga/anime Naruto, Shikamaru belongs to a village that is composed of many clans of shinobi, in other words ninja, and when Shikamaru and his two teammates use the powers that they have inherited from their respective clans together as one, that maneuver is a something they call 'Ino-Shika-Cho', after the first parts of their names. Since I made a bow earlier in 2018 that I named 'Ino', I thought I'd name this one 'Shika' and then make another bow and call it 'Cho' and make my own little series. Some of you may find that weird and that's okay, we all have to follow our own drummers. The painted symbols are the symbol of the character Shikamaru's clan. I do not yet have a full draw picture of this bow because I have yet to get someone to take my picture of me pulling this bow back outside, so I put a picture of the bow's tiller on the tillering stick so you guys can look at the tiller in that way at least. Will definitely update once I get that full draw picture. Thanks for looking!
Thanks,
Aaron
https://imgur.com/AEAfC73https://imgur.com/GgSI74thttps://imgur.com/xR0aOF1https://imgur.com/MFllbSBhttps://imgur.com/cAh2gCphttps://imgur.com/Hkzxjkuhttps://imgur.com/tXHjz7phttps://imgur.com/y0hia0N
