I cut a good size Yellow Birch about 20 years ago, made a few bows with the wood but was generally not that impressed with it so the rest sat in storage ever since. Last year I pulled out a quarter log and started wondering how it would do as backings. I squared the edges up and cut a quarter sawn strip for bending to see how it behaved. I was totally impressed with the wood. I could practically tie the strip into a knot except for where the strip was cut from the butt end. There it broke quite easily and I could see from the break that the tree had for some reason grown in a slight spiral for the first 20" so I shelved that idea. I sort of figured though that a plain sawn strip from this wood would be okay.
Now I'm not one to waste good wood and I had cut a belly strip from a primo HHB stave that I used to make a D bow a few months ago. The strip was only 1/2" thick at best but I knew I could make something from it if I backed it so couple weeks ago I decided to try the plain sawn Birch on it. Because the HHB was a bit thin I used a slightly thicker backing to make up the difference at the grip and tapered it aggressively for the limbs. You can see from the pictures that it worked quite well.
The bow is 61" N to N with 1 1/2" wide limbs tapering to 1/2" wide nocks. I didn't add any reflex in the glue-up until about 2/3 of the way down the limbs. The bow lost hardly any of the glued in reflex and finished up at just over 50# @ 28", I even pulled it to 29" to see what that would do to it. It's got some impressive string tension. Here's some pics of the finished bow
