Heat treat color on belly

[Black Moshannon]

I have just finished a heat treated hickory D bow. Will post pics once I finish the finish on it and make a string for it. I did a two hour heat treat over a grill with coals. The grill is long and I was able to do almost all of one limb at a time. I did this when I had just gotten the bow to brace and it was still very strong. As a result, I ended up scraping away all of the dark toast and you can’t even tell the bow was treated. I really don’t care for that because I like the looks of a toasted belly, but also wondering if I lost some advantage of a stiffer belly by losing all the dark stuff. I might have re heat treated but I spent so much time on the tiller and I’m fairly happy with the bow as is. Any thoughts? Next bow I will treat later into the tillering

[bownarra]

If it was me I'd redo the heat treat. I prefer to get to about 20" before heat treating. Maybe a light one earlier to sort out limb profile/twist etc.
Now that you have it to full draw and the tiller is good it is also likely to need very little re-working tiller-wise if you heat treat agin. Any weight gain should be reduced by reducing width evenly (assuming tiller is even). Not reducing thickness keeps the strain the same. Thicker's quicker and all that

[Black Moshannon]

Will have to do that on the next one. At least I know the heat treat had better be done later into the tiller. I'm afraid to do more to this one.

[Eric Krewson]

Most of the dark is gone from my bows bellies during final sanding and fine tune tillering with an orbital sander. Leaving one dark is not necessary, you should have heated the bow deeply into the core, this is where most of the change will take place.

[Black Moshannon]

The whole bow got really hot during the heat treat. I'd imagine it was sufficient