This is a bow I made for a guy with long arms that wants a short bow to hunt big Pigs. It's also my second attempt at making the bow, needless to say a short bow and a long draw are a difficult combination to make. My first try was a Hickory backed Osage 60" long and 1 3/8" wide limbs and it was pulling about 75# @ 31"...it broke. I had the bow fully tillered and was beginning to do the finish on it when I did a full draw with it again. The bow exploded violently. The Hickory let go on the top limb, it was a quarter sawn strip. You can see what happened here in this picture
I figured I would try the lower density and more elastic wood Yew for the second try. Now I know that White Ash makes an excellent backing for Yew but I was a bit worried about using a quarter sawn backing after the first failure. So I chased a good ring on a White Ash stave and ripped a flat sawn backing strip, a bit of a pain but worthwhile. I steamed the recurves in a pair of Yew billets then glued them together in deflex. Then I used dry heat to reflex the limbs and glued more reflex in with the Ash. In all it started with about 5" of reflex and after tillering the bow out to 31" it kept almost 3" of that. I have drawn the bow out to full draw many times and it has settled to about 2" of reflex now. I also shot it a couple times using a 550 grain arrow and a 28" draw. It is fast, in fact probably as fast as any bow I have ever made. The bow turned out at 60" long with 1 1/2" wide limbs and it pulls 63# @ 28", I can't pull it back any further with the hand held scale I have. That should project out to about 70# @ 31". Here's a couple pictures
The braced image is corrupted so I will have to upload it later
