I haven't posted a bow for a while, I've made a couple of nice primitives, fairly similar, one Hazel, one Maple.
Now I know you guys like a nice long back story before the pics
... so.
Long long ago in a woodland just over the road I spotted a big Oak which had blown down in a storm and taken a Maple with it.
A nice length of the Maple split in two somehow ended up in my garage
.
Then, a few weeks back a young lad came over with his dad to talk about making longbows bows and history, so I let him split the worse half of the Maple, he enjoyed it as he'd never done anything like that before as he lives in the big city of London where they don't have woods, but they have cars and trains that go under the ground
and the pavements are paved with gold
.
So anyway I made it into bow...
As it was a fairly decent diameter I managed to use the underbark surface as the back with no decrowning for a nice change.
It's got some lovely twists and swoops, the upper limb tip has a real quirky wiggle which I was tempted to cut off, but wanted to keep maximum length. The target was 45-55# at 28" but as it's only 62" tip to tip I went for 50#.
it's actually about 48, but pulls to 50# at 29" which gives some safety margin.
There is very little set, with the belly side tips against a wall I can just about get my little finger between grip and wall, which is pretty good, (I usually expect to get two fingers)
Below a pic taken outside Hertford Town Hall where they have two rather fine Deer sculptures.
Here's the swoopy deflex tip, it's a design feature to equalise the string angles between the limbs compensating for their differing lengths (Oh, my pants have just spontaneously ignited
)
Some lovely Maple figre on the belly side of that tip...
Her's the back of the bow at that tip, the guy I made it for wanted self pin nocks (I think 'shoulder' nocks is a good description), otherwise I'd have gone a bit thinner at the tip and done an overlay.
The grip is pretty minimalist and overflows into the fades a fair bit, I was careful to keep a close eye on the limb thickness as I was adjusting the grip for comfort and made sure I didn't push it too far.
Oh and I s'pose you want to see it at full draw?
This time I went for a more elliptical tiller following all the discussion we've been having, I haven't shot it through the chrono yet, but I know it's pretty quick for 50# as it shot 12 yards past our 180 yard marker, slighly uphill.
During the build it had a little steam bending and couple of doses of heat treatment, full build along on my blog starting here...
http://bowyersdiary.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/maple-primitive.html(Oh, and before ayone comments on that last pic... it's my camera bag, not a cod piece!
)
Del
