English longbow from Dutch yew, comments welcome, especially on tiller

[bubby]

It could use 5-7 scrapes in the spot will stated, but if she shoots well and you are happy with it just shoot her and have fun, chasing perfection can sometimes end up with unhappy results, beautiful bow

[marcelslot]

Hi all,

After careful consideration, I did some additional scraping on the upper 1/3 part of the upper limb. See pictures for the result.

Now elliptical tiller. Symmetrical top/bottom limb bend as far I can see. Definately some change achieved. Did not loose any measurable poundage. Scraping was also not much.

Happy with the result. Let me know if you can spot the difference with previously posted pictures.

Yew is definately a good and easy to work with bow.

One more question I have regarding the comment on the sapwood thickness and reducing its thickness: was that meant WITHOUT violating growth rings on the back of the bow stave? I guess so, but just wanted to be sure...

By the way: the bow has no more than 1,5" of set after debracing, so the relatively thick layer of sapwood has not had any negative effect on this aspect.

Be well,
Marcel

[sieddy]

That bow looks great! Also It is very inspiring as I am shortly going to start work on a peice of Yew with quite  thick sapwood and that gives me confidence to just give it a go!

[Del the cat]

Yes it does look more even .
I sometimes find that I'll still be making minor changes a while after a bow is finished... in fact I'm not sure if a bow is ever finished!
These very small changes don't seem make a lot of difference, but probably help the longevity of the bow  by spreading the strain more evenly (like PatM said).
Far better to make several small adjustments than to reach for the rasp and ruin a bow. Mind it's surprising how much work it is to take 5# off the draw weight (I recently did it for a guy at our club, and it did need the rasp!)
Del

[WillS]

Reducing sapwood can be done at low draw weights like this without any attention to rings.  You can probably get up to around 90# before you need to worry about violating sapwood rings. 

That's not to say just charge through them like crazy, but you definitely don't need to sit there with a scraper and sandpaper following one ring.  I tend to mark about 5mm of sapwood thickness and just chop down the rest with a drawknife, and then tidy up any obvious problems with small areas of lots of violations.  You can't do this with most woods as they'd fail on the back, but yew can take an amazing amount of problems before it comes close to giving up. 

Dutch yew is identical to English yew, and I recently finished a 105# English yew bow with terrible violations - in fact the heartwood is showing through the back in one part, as the sapwood suddenly thinned out without me realising while reducing thickness in the early stages.  It's still shooting nicely with no problems.

The low draw weight of your bow is another reason you're not seeing much set - it's possible that with this much sapwood on a heavier bow you'd get quite a lot more set.

[adb]

I think your tiller looks better now. Nicely done!

[cdpbrewer]

Really good job- the limb symmetry is excellent!

c.d.

[marcelslot]

Hey C.D.

Thanks! That's a pretty nice and convincing photo-trick. Have to find out how to do that sometime. Thanks for the effort.
Shot the bow for an hour or so today with some different arrows. With some arrows I got pretty consistend grouping when target shooting at 20 yards.
Looking forward to shoot it on longer distance, but the weather is pretty horrible right now in the Netherlands.

Be well
Marcel