Good Day Everyone,
I built a special bow and wanted to show it off. This story begins about 8 months ago when my good friend and archery shooting mentor went through some very hard times. Rob suffered some great loses and I wanted to show my support. I offered to build him a bow of his liking of any design. All he had to do was tell me what he wanted and I would do the rest. He decided on a modern R/D longbow design with a pistol grip handle to match his other traditional bows. With that information in mind this is what I came up with…
The bow is 63.25” NTN following the curves. It is made up of a bamboo back, hickory powerlam, tapered maple core, and an osage belly. The riser is constructed from laminated black cherry pieces. The bow has symmetrical limbs with the arrow shelf about 1.75” above center. It draws 41# at 28"
The bow was glued up with close to 4” of reflex off the form. It retains 1.5” of reflex and takes only ¼” set after shooting.
I finished the bamboo with a cordovan leather dye. The tip overlays are osage that has been dyed brown as well. After the dye I added 3 coats of shellac to the bow before my final finish of semi gloss water based spar varnish. A leather handle wrap and arrow rest finished it off
This is a great shooting longbow, holding a consistent 175 fps with 10 grain per lb arrows. It is as smooth and shock free as can be expected with the R/D design.
I had the pleasure of gifting the bow to Rob and getting to watch his enjoyment of shooting his new bow. He loves it and has vowed to take a deer with it this fall. This was the first bow I have built for someone other than myself. I really took my time to make sure everything looked good before handing it off. This bow was a fun project and I cant wait to see what Rob does with it!
Enjoy,
Taylor
