hickory board help?

[Academonicon]

I need advice from you wise folk.  I have a hickory board, 2.25"x1.75" and about 7 feet long, and I'm trying to decide whether it's usable.  The grain pattern looks friendly enough, but here's the problem: half the board is heartwood, and the other half is sapwood, but the transition runs at an angle that makes it impossible to get either an all-heartwood or all-sapwood bow out of it.  The angle is also such that I don't really have a way to make a heartwood bow with a layer of sapwood on the back either. My question is, is it possible to build a functioning bow (i.e., one that won't break immediately) that basically ignores the transition from heartwood to sapwood, bearing in mind that this is hickory so both HW and SW are functionally usable on their own?

(At the moment, my inclination is to split the stave into two billets and rotate and shape them so that I make a bow with one sapwood limb and one heartwood limb, Frankenstein-style.)

Thanks for any advice you can offer.

[fiddler49]

Heart wood and sap wood are not different in hickory as far as bow making, just the looks.  cheers fiddler49

[bubby]

Make it

[Drewster]

I've made hickory heartwood bows and I've made hickory sapwood bows but have never mixed the two.  I like your idea of the billet bow with the different limbs.  They might tiller a little differently, but I'd give it a try.

Can you chase a ring with this board or are you going to have to back it?  Good luck and have fun.

[Academonicon]

Thanks, folks.  If I can get a bow out of this piece, it'll be the third I'll have gotten from the same piece of lumber, which is pretty damn good.  And to answer your question, I'll probably end up having to back it.  Chasing a ring isn't an option with the way this piece was cut, and unbacked seems like asking for trouble.

[make-n-break]

You'd be surprised what you can get away with on an unbacked hickory. my first  3 or 4 bows were hideous peices of hickory and even though the grain and tiller is horrifying, somehow they're still alive (they don't get used cuz they'll crack your teeth when you loose an arrow lol). Ignore the light and dark wood. One of my favorites that I gifted my brother had sapwood/heartwood weaving all around on it. Made for a cool pattern and he still shoots it regularly two years later.

[LittleBen]

I've built many hickory backed bows using mixes of heartwood and sapwood and it's fine. I think unless you're building some super highly stressed bow, the difference won't matter. I can tell you that hickory heartwood is often significantly more dense than the sapwood and also stiffer. But that will all work out in tillering

[Dakota Kid]

I had similar concerns. It turned out to be the best shooter I've built thus far. I even finished it on my birthday.