I would love to improve on Tim Baker's mantra. But I have no interest in learning and using higher math and physics, almost from scratch, at my age. I also have no time and energy to make hundreds of bows. I would love to have the ability to do thought experiments on mechanics of natural material, especially using ordinary language.
IMHO most hobbyists can only rely on their sense of "beautiful curves" and arrow speed or flight distance. But I have faith in our common sense. If we think hard enough, we might be able to come up with an ordinary language paradigm for making decent bows without too much trial and error. Therefore I spend more time thinking about the "best process" to follow in making good natural material bows, than actually making bows.
The only thing that's actually going for me for now is that I have no vested interest in any dogma. I don't have to commit to any of dogmas. They are usually too vague and ambiguous or way too specific, to be useful anyway. Common sense does not have to be simplistic. If you are cock sure about something in this life, you are probably clueless about it.
With humility but also with sincere faith in our capability, we need to tackle whatever that is worthwhile. If lawyers can decide life and death issues using mostly ordinary language reasoning, we can probably come up with an improved mantra useful for making good bows. As I said earlier, I think it would be useful to combine Tim's mantra with the mass principle. We are pursuing more efficiency here. Searching for perfection would be silly and counter-productive.
My current guiding principle is "the evil of banality". What is our most common mistake in making wooden self-bows? Most beginners are too eager to bend the staves when those are not ready. To many people, this kind of reasoning process might look silly. But this common sense reasoning is what actually prevails even in this forum. By and by, I will do my best, if my schedule permits, to flesh out how we can actually make our bows more efficient, by just talking about them using ordinary language. No technical jargon, no higher math or physics required. It has been that way for thousands of years and bow making did evolve.
