I have run across statements like this many times
Most older bows with wood or wood/glass limbs are not designed to take the performance strings such as Fast Flight, BCY 450, etc and Dacron is the preferred choice for these older or lightly constructed recurve bows.
What do they mean by"designed to take"? I've always(except for the first) used Fast Flight without a second thought. Didn't like the stretch of B50. What can go wrong using "modern strings"?
Going back to the original question, the bow builders will build their bows to be good enough to handle whatever string material they are accustomed to using. Dacron is pretty forgiving and allows the bow builder to get away with things that they may not have considered if they had developed their bows using using the latest grade of SK99 Dyneema. For example, use of weak paper micarta tip overlays, designs using thin wide tips with abrupt side notches cut into the limb, leaving excessive limb mass in the outer limb, use of large string loops that tend to split a tip rather than hold it together, or use of thin string loops, or bonding methods, etc.
I have some bows built prior to the advent of Dacron and these have many characteristics that should allow them to work just fine with the more modern FF-type materials. Linen was the high performance string material at that time, which is much less elastic than the synthetic Dacron/polyester materials that eventually replaced them.
It is also interesting to see the influence string materials have on historical bow designs too. For example, many horn bow designs use very large string loops with a relatively narrow and weak nock in the bow limb. The strings used with these bows were typically made of silk, which has very elastic properties similar Dacron. When manufacturers started building modern versions of these bows, they had all kinds of issues with the durability of the nock with modern string materials, but they figured out how to address this without adding any significant mass or having a major impact on the appearance of the bow. One method is to add thin overlays of woven glass or linen micarta to either side of the siyah nock to prevent splitting. Another way is to add an insert of glass or micarta into a slot cut into the middle of the tip to prevent splitting. These methods are similar to the methods used to prevent arrow nocks from splitting.
When I started building very heavy flight bows using the latest ultra-stiff string materials and shooting sub-1ggp arrows, it was common to blow a tip overlay off after only a couple shots. But I have learned to adjust to this without adding performance-robbing bulk to the limbs and now i rarely experience this failure.
Bottom line is wood self bows are more than capable of handling the latest string materials. The bow builder will figure out how to make their design work with whatever string material they intend to use.
Alan
