Heat tempering question.

[autologus]

Typically which woods respond well and which woods do not respond well to heat tempering the belly?  The last bow I attempted to make I was probably over zealous with the design and overpowered the belly and it chrysled really bad.  I was hoping that maybe heat tempering the belly would help with that.

Grady

[H Rhodes]

I have had great results with heat treating white oak and winged elm bows.  Pretty good results with hickory and pecan.  Osage, in my opinion, is just too good a bow wood to waste time tempering.  Traditional Bowyer's Bible, Volume 4, has a great chapter on heat treating, and is where I learned about it.

[autologus]

I have volume I, I guess I will have to pick up the other copies soon.

Grady

[tom sawyer]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that heat tempering will improve the compression characteristics of any wood.  However, a wood that tends to be brittle and prone to chrysalling (eg hickory) is still going to be prone to chrysalling when heat treated.  The key is figuring out what you can get away with as far as limb thickness and degree of bend.  If you've had a failure, you have a data point.  Next time make the limb a little wider/thinner, or a little longer, or tiller it a little smoother, and heat treat it also, and you have a higher probability of success.

[lostarrow]

Generally any wood that has a high tension to compression ratio. If the back can't take the extra stress created by tempering the back ,you will get tension failure on the back.The tempering process increases the compression resistance on the belly. Just finished a Hickory ,turned out great. Experimented with Tree of heaven(Very week in tension) complete failure.I don't know what I was thinking there. Red Oak,HHB, has also fared quite well for me.

[SLIMBOB]

  I am a fairly recent convert to the idea of heat tempering.  I have heat tempered Hackberry and a low density Osage belly.  In all cases it has made a pretty remarkable improvement in performance.  All the bows have taken less set than expected.  Much less in the Hackberrys, and enough so in the Osage that I won't hesitate on the next one.  I think just about any white wood is a candidate from what I can tell.  Especially woods that are prone to set.  Woods that are tension strong and compression weak.