The other day I found in a junk pile of wood in a friend’s workshop a broken rib from a large terrace umbrella, 140 x 3.8 x 2 cm. Very dense tropical hardwood (measured to SG 0.88, I think Azobe). I asked if I could have it, and took it home. Grain was just perfect, hardly any ring runoff on any side of the stave. Cut it to 138 cm (54") and started a flatbow with skinny tips (5 mm x 11 mm thick, and gently tapering to the fades at 13 mm thick). 3 hours of scraping later I had tillered it to 50# at 25”, shot it a few times and it seemed to be really fast. I had cut out the wood so the bow would shoot nearly centershot, so as to be able to use stiff light arrows for flight shooting.
The bow did take nearly 1” of set during tillering, so I decided to heat some 1.5” reflex in it, and hoping to retain 0.5” when broken in.
During the final part of tempering of the first limb, just before my timer was about to tell me the limb was toasted entirely I heard a clang in the workshop. The heat gun plus stand hand fallen off the caul and bow, and the belly had lifted from the caul, showing a big crack in the lower limb (where I was heating the last section) and a clear hinge on the back. No repair this time.
This has never happened to me, but surely this was a bummer. Same caul I use for most bows, when I want a gentle reflex. A typical example of good-better-broken, but unexpected. I like it when you can make bows from unusual sources like this umbrella, but this was really the downer of this weekend.
Moving on ... I might fish-tail splice a new tip to this one though, some day.
