Joinery

[DC]

 Does anyone have any hints as to how I can end up with a nice glue line on a curved joint like this?

[Del the cat]

Patience, (like most bow making stuff) a strong light behind it so you can look for gaps and maybe steam and clamp it, for a near perfect fit. Then dismantle and glue when cooled and dried.
I don't see that the joint is actually curved, isn't it a straight splice, but simply on curved pieces?
Can't really see the mechanical arrangement of the joint.
Del

[DC]

These two surfaces are joined. What I did was scrub a piece of carbon paper(boy was that hard to find) between the two and sand off the black spots. Did that until I thought I was close then I used double sided tape to stick sandpaper to one surface and scrubbed the other piece against it. Then moved the sandpaper to the other surface and repeat.
We'll see how it goes after the epoxy sets. I'm still looking for any better ideas. Rocking the block back and forth tends to remove a little more wood at the ends which is the only spot that will actually show. That's assuming I put a leather handle on it.

[bradsmith2010]

nobody said it gonna be easy,,

[Hamish]

 A bit late to the party, I would have spray adhesived some course sand paper to the riser block and rubbed it back and forth on the stave to make a matching surface.  Then remove the paper and adhesive, with acetone, then freshened up the surface of the riser with paper again.
Your method looks like it will work fine too, if you used a good gap filling glue like epoxy.

[PatM]

I do this all the time.  It just takes patience.  I use three hacksaw blades taped together as a sort of rasping scraper to scoop out the  stave section once an initial portion is rasped out.

[upstatenybowyer]

I like Pat's idea. Never done this though.

Is that plum and yew? 

[DC]

Hamish- that's basically what I did but I used double sided tape to hold the sandpaper. I think adhesive backed sandpaper would work great.
Pat- How does that help match the surfaces? How do you know where to remove wood?
Upstate- It's all Yew. It's a highly reflexed Yew branch and the insert/riser is a piece of scrap yew. The colors don't match very well though. Here's a poor picture of what I started with. The sapwood is kind of funny looking and there is a couple of big knots that some bonehead(me) cut too close so I'm a little apprehensive about this one.

[Deerhunter21]

How are you able to get the pictures under 250 kb? sorry if its off topic.

[DC]

I have an old digital camera that I set to 640x480. I use it exclusively for internet pictures. No resizing necessary.

[Marc St Louis]

I personally don't like gluing a thick piece in like that I would recommend using several thin pieces

[Stick Bender]

Don I did 4 of these riser/belly overlays in the last year different material but same concept, I will tell you how I did it if it will help I start by putting centering marks on both the overlay & the bow center then I put the bow directly on top of the overlay & trace the radius making sure the center marks are centered then I will cut grind or whats available tell no pencil line is visible , I get a directional light (flash light) and clamp the belly overlay to the bow & shine the light on the opposet side you can cleary see the high spots sand those and re fit when you think you have it close , scribe pencil marks all over the jointing surface of the overlay and tape in place on your bow a strip of 80 grit sand paper , match your center marks and shimmy your overlay back and fourth with in 1/4" of your center marks the pencil will be removed from any high spots re sand and re fit tell you get a perfect fit using my system I can do one from start to finish now in about 11/2 hour ! Hope it helped

[DC]

Marc- Do you use thin enough pieces so you can clamp them with bike tube rubber? On a previous bow I did use some veneer that I had kicking around but it took a lot of layers, 15 if I remember right. It turned out nice though. Do you think many layers is any stronger than one chunk?

SB- That's pretty much what I did. Basically get it close and use sticky back sandpaper. It worked pretty quickly but Yew is soft wood. I'd hate to try it with Ocean Spray

[Del the cat]

Oh, I see it now  ... yeah, what they all said...
Del

[Bayou Ben]

That's the way I do it too DC.  Tape sandpaper to the bow, then sand, check, sand, check, repeated a couple hundred times.  I shine a light too.