What I imagine is that those things come with technology itself rather than set of rules which is artificially imposed from higher authorirty.
Imagine yourself to be a bowyer, or better yet aprentice. You get stave which is almost twice as wide as typical bow, it still has all the sapwood and perhaps bark, which is chipping off. It is also very long.
To lay out the bow, you would probably clean it briefly, look for deffects and trim sides, but not very much. Then the sapwood thinning comes, again to reveal any defects, if present. (Constant bickering about the wood quality seems to be bread and butter of medieval bowyer). The aim is to make the bow as heaviest the stave allows, because lighter bows can be made from worse quality staves in numbers aplenty. When the sapwood is worked down, the taper for width will be laid out as to chose cleanest availble strip and rough shape chipped out with small hand axe.
Then either spokeshave or rasp is used to clan up the sides and the edge of back is scraped into radius.
That is the point where according to experience and in accordance to width the thickness will be laid down and again chiped or worked down with drawknife.
There are small flat areas on sides of biggest MR profiles, which suggest that this was a common practice - to start clean work with squared stave.
That is the point where experienced person has to start work on rounding the belly and the tiler, but with very much experience the shaping can be done without need to tiler much and then again somebody else will set the nock.
Imagine the workhsop where perhaps master, two or three aprentices and journeyman or two work. The master does what is most difficult and the rest according their best abilities, or they rotate among the workplaces.
Our big mistake is to think that a single bow is a single mans work. Perhaps three or four people worked on one bow as it went through the workshop - to make lots of them in row. So standartisation of process (even though not standartisation of dimensions) will be desirable.
Some things about technollogy as the idea of tools or sucession of steps which were taken can be derived from the product when we look closely. For example - lighter collor on the tips of the bows shows where the horn was and normally it goes around the tip, altough not much care is taken about the edge of horn or things like this, but there is one MR bow which has discoloration reaching into horn area on both sides of the tip. That is without doubt a mark of that the bow had the tips narrowed for better cast with no regards to horn tips after it was made and perhaps shot in (and found dissatisfiing in cast).
Jaro
