Sorry for the radio silence, seemed to me that I wasn't making any decent progress since every time I'd start to get in the groove after work I'd hear things like "When are we going to eat?", "Weren't we going to go out and do some errands?" and "Are you going to sleep tonight?"
FINALLY though, I think I've had a breakthrough. Mental more than anything else. I was getting pretty discouraged and waffling on whether or not I was mucking up the entire thing, when something clicked and I found out how to properly manipulate the draw knife in a way that seems to work for me, and how to manipulate it around knots. It might seem like a small thing, but I'm used to being adept at the tools I use and it was frustrating to scrape a certain way and have the wood react in a way that made no sense to me.
Last night I definitively hit heartwood AND figured out how to shave off around a knot. The one pictured is close to the center and near the end of the limb, so I knew I didn't want to mess that one up. I'm pretty happy with how it cleaned up! The pictures are a before/after of the same area
Side note, I'm not sure if you can see, but off to the right side are some "ripples", they showed up as I was using a two-handed scraper thing. I didn't like that happening, so I pulled out my folding knife and just scraped away with that, which seems to work a lot better for me. Any tips on preventing those marks? I'm probably just not using the scraper correctly.
I just want to say, thanks for adding me to this make a long, I probably would have never made an attempt at making my first bow and learning so much in the process. I realize that I'm slow as a glacier here, so if you want to knock me out of the trade I'll be fine with that, I came into the game late as it is and I don't want to hold up anyone. I'm just glad to have learned as much as I have and I'll definitely be stalking this thread and continuing to work on this bow!
