holmegaard challenge--all bows finished...pics galore

[radius]

cool, parnell...be really careful with that top one....looks like it has a knot in the center of the handle, and this is where the bending forces are first felt, before the bend moves as the wood thins. 

YESTERDAY'S PROGRESS

Got this bow pulling 50# at 24" from the back.  It took some set so i heat treated it using the heat gun and pine varnish a la Marc St Louis.  Now it is dead straight and waiting for its next session.  So far i found the pull is smooth, easy, and the recovery is fast.  I pull it to full poundage and sometimes simply relax my back and shoulders, and the return on the limbs almost takes my arms off!










You can see how much set there was, by comparing the back of the bow to the lines on the kitchen floor. 

[radius]

50# @ 24"






Here's a picture of uneven tiller caused by too much puffing and not enough passing.  It was actually quite a bit worse but i fixed it a bit before i thought to take the picture.

[radius]

my main tool at this stage is a cabinet scraper.  The oak is damn hard, and i find i have to sharpen the scraper fairly often.  But a sharp scraper is a wonderful thing, so it is worth it!

[radius]

here's a quote about white oak that i think was assembled by tim baker.

OAKS: California black .57; southern red .59; northern red, sessil, pin, bur .63; scarlet .67; white .68; Whiteoak is about as close to unbreakable as wood can be. In my bend tests it breaks after hickory. Bows I’ve made of white oak took large sets without much excuse. On the other hand, I haven’t been able to break a bow made from this wood. One was steamed into 6” of reflex. When tillered it took 7” of set, standing at one inch of string follow at 55lb, and equaled the cast of any equal-follow bow. Of several whiteoak bows, from several different trees, the one that stayed straightest was fine-ringed, high-percentage early growth. Quite strange. One correspondent reported less set in his white oak bows, others report similar set. White oak is extremely strong in tension.

[Kviljo]

Very cool experiment! I've been thinking of doing the same thing, if I just could find the time.

But. I think if you are going to compare these in a flight-shoot or in a chronograph, it will be very dependent on how light you can get the outer limbs. This is probably the most significant advantage of the design - extremely light outer limbs. They also need to bend just a little to get them as light as they need to be for them to make the bow fast.

I've made a few of this design and used them for flight shooting, and it seems like the ones with very long outer limbs are the slowest, because they need to be quite thick not to bend much. The one that has shot the longest (389 yards) is this one. You can see the proportion of outer limbs to the inner. I feel that this is quite optimal.

[radius]

okay, having fully decided that my objective is to craft 3 good bows, not 2 shit bows and one cool one, i have gone with Robert's good advice and made the limbs wider as they get shorter; or rather, i have made them narrower as they got longer.

The first one is full width, 2".  The second is 1 3/4, and the third, with the longest bending section of limb, is just over 1.5".

[radius]

okay so i got the first one to full draw.

Here ya go:

You can see from the full draw pic that the string angle is very low.  It even LOOKS greater than it really is, because i carved away a taper off the inside of the tip, about 3/8" to nothing over 5".










This was awesome.  After heat treating it, i had a few benefits. 

1.  The poundage went up from 50 @ 24 to 50 @ 21. 

2.  It smelled like sweet pine sap when i scraped it.

3.  The varnish seemed to have saturated the porous earlywood on the belly, and made the wood seem denser.


I tried a few different ways of carving the levers to reduce the tips and add something unique.  The first attempt, some runes, looked bad so i rasped them off.  The next attempt, a spiral, worked perfectly, but when i attempted to carve leaves in between the lines of the spiral, they looked bad (read,i suck) so i rasped them off. 

This is pretty much how they look now. 







The spirals are on in such a way that when the bow is drawn to full, they all seem to point at the nock.  It's simple, but i like it, and strangely enough, just by using the same 45 degree angle that the string nocks have, the parallel lines wind up being 2.5" away from each other, fitting in perfectly with the length of the transition from limb to lever.  Just a happy chance.  I'm not that good.

Can't wait to see how the other two play out. 

[Josh]

looks cool!   How does it shoot? 

[radius]

well, josh, i live in the middle of a city and have no car to get to anywhere safe to shoot...BUT!  in my apartment, this bow can hit the target from 10 feet away very fast

 

[TBod]

Tiller looks extremely good to me. Very cool bow with so long levers and short bending limb.

[radius]

thanks man...and i got this thing out to OVER 50#...it's a good one

[Dustybaer]

absolutely fascinating project.  can't wait for the progress on the other two.  thanks for taking us on this journey.

[radius]

thanks, Marius...

I have the other two bows at the same stage of the work:

both have:

nocks

all transitions blended in

bending limb reduced to about 1/2 " thick

bellies tempered


so...now i just gotta wait a few days and get back to it...meantime i'd like to work on my son's yew longbow...but that one hurts my back!

[ravenbeak]

looking good scott,

keep up the good work.


jamie

[radius]

thanks jamie