Leaving a bow braced to breakin????

[radius]

What about leaving a bow pulled to draw weight (say, if you hit draw weight at 20", hooking it on at 20" and leaving it there?)....anybody do this?  Or just braced?

[Pappy]

Not unless you like a lot of set and string follow.
   Pappy

[bigcountry]

After I have one close to tillered out. I will leave it strung for a few hours at a time while finishing it up..

This makes sense to me.  I wonder when dean wrote that, he meant this, not a floor tillered bow.

[radius]

Not unless you like a lot of set and string follow.
   Pappy

that's what i figured.

[Kegan]

I've left tillered-to-brace bows strung at brace for 24 hours before. I started doing this with board bows to prevent them form breaking. Now I leave them overnight once I get it tillered to brace to prevent alot of weight loss later on. As it was said, if the bow can't take it I wouldn't want to find that out while hunting.

Oh, and even when leaving it braced I usually don't get too much string follow unless I underbuilt the bow in the first place.

[radius]

ok, and kegan builds some heavy duty bows...

...consensus leans toward sweating the bow ...

[D. Tiller]

I'm going to try this with one of my bows I'm working on. Should be interesting to see how it comes out!  How about exercising the limbs while tillering? Something just says to me it just ends up collapsing cell structure before its time. It may have something to do with the type of wood being used too. I will play around with it in the future.

David T

[Adam Keiper]

I'm a believer in fully excercising bows all through construction, and certainly before they are done.  To me, that includes giving a nearly finished bow one, two, or even three overnight braces of at least 8 to 12 hours.  SET!  STRESS!  ANGST!  Yeah, yeah, I know, but I look at it this way.  Any bow I make will have to endure countless hours at brace while hunting, or even while roving or target shooting.  I want the bow to take all the set, weight loss, and tiller changes that it's going to take on the front end, and NOT next week or 6 months later.  So, when a bow gets within 2 or 3 inches of full draw, I like to leave them at partial or full brace overnight to allow the limbs to settle in to whatever they're going to do.  I prefer to do that more than once on heavier or more highly stressed bows.  I EXPECT a bow to take a little more set or drop a pound or two in weight during this period.  (I do this in addition to fully excersing the limbs after each step of wood removal and shooting in a bow with 100 or 200 arrows or more, to be sure all is well.)  Then once a bow is done, I don't have any worries about it loosing weight, flipping tiller, and all the other nonsense that breaks the hearts of bowmen.  I don't want a bow that I have to worry about coddling.  When I leave my truck at black-thirty to go hunting, I have no qualms about leaving it strung until I come out a noon or whenever, over and over, all season long.  And when the season ends, I know my bow will draw the same weight as opening morning.  Perhaps it's not always "needed", but if you've had bad experiences with bows dropping weight or with limbs performing contortions after use, or if you're tired of thoughts like, "Oh dear, it's been an hour, maybe I should unstring this thing," crossing your mind, then maybe you want to try giving your next bow a long overnight brace or three.

Rest assured, a long brace won't kill your bow...at least not if it was designed and tillered properly with dry wood.  Again, this is done when nearing final tiller and not during floor- or early-tillering stages, and only when the tiller is looking good.  This 67#-er was made with at least two such sessions.  This photo was taken right after it was completed.  Several hunts and a few thousand arrows later, it still looks the same.  Same reflex, same weight, same braced fingerprint.


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[mullet]

  I do what Jawge does. I will not leave an untillered bow strung very long. I exercise it quite a bit on the tree while I'm tillering. I worry if I leave it strung unfinished the wood might want to develope bad habits. It doesn't bother me to leave it strung over night if it is finished, unless I've been hunting in the rain all day.

[Pat B]

Just about every bow I build I build to hunt with. Generally 2 will make grade each year.
   I leave a newly tillered bow braced for 4 to 6 hours to sweat it. If it has a weakness I don't want it to show up on stand.

[denny]

I mostly sweat a bow if it has a lot of reflex in it, one that I might have laminated. AS some one said it helps to train the grain. also I only do it for a few hours, no reason for my standards to leave it any longer unless its a heavy bow. denny

[El Destructo]

I don't leave an Untillered Bow Strung past working on it....but once I have a Bow completed...I always string it up....sit it in the Corner...and leave it that way at least overnight....always.....and it has never to this day had anything but good results....no adverse effects....some of you all seen my Paddle Bows and others I took to the Classic....they are some characters ....and they can shoot....but there is no string follow either....if it is Tillered Properly it should not hurt a thing to leave them strung to sweat them in.....JMO

[Bullitt]

In the Bent Stick, Paul talks of compaction of the limbs during tillering. We don;t want suprises, like hinges or extreme weakness in one limb. He suggests, that once you are pretty even on tiller before bracing, put on long string and use a long tiller stick and give it as much bend, as possible for...3-5 minutes. If you have his book, read under,  More on Tillering.

   Also a couple of years after the first TBB came out. I asked Dean if he would sell the Elm Bow, pictured in the book. He said he lost that bow after leaving it strung to long! Good shootin and tillering,Steve.

[bigcountry]

Well, this has been very educational for me.  Thanks for all who replied.  I wished I did this on my last osage.  I had it tillered good, but the bow had natural deflex, and I thought I could take that out.  So I flipped the tips.  Went to check thetiller, and it was stiff where I flipped one tip.  So like a fool I took off some material.  Tiller looked great.  Shot it about 60 shots, and went back to check tiller, and developed a hinge where I removed the material.  So it was decieving on stiffness. 

I bet if i left it strung for 6 hours, the limbs would have came into place.  Thanks all.

[Kegan]

ok, and kegan builds some heavy duty bows...

...consensus leans toward sweating the bow ...

I'll say this though: I've found that if a bow is too heavy after sweating, trying to drop alot of weight usualy winds up with a bow that doesn't shoot very well (like shooting ina  bow at 80# when you wanted one that was 55#). In cases where I'm trying to get the bow to a specific weight for someone else, I usually sweat it after getting to half draw or so and seeing that the bow is going to be about 10-15# overweight at that point.