Heat treating maple?

[Flntknp17]

All,

I am considering trying to heat treat the belly of a bamboo and maple bow I’ve been working on.  The bow is made from scraps of other projects and as such, is only 1” wide because that’s all the material width there was on the maple, but I decided to try anyway as an experiment and the bow shoots extremely well and seems like it will survive.  I am pondering heat treating the belly before sealing it and have never tried this with maple before.  Anyone else done this with maple?

Thanks

Matt

[DC]

Have you already glued the boo on to the maple? If so you can't give it a good heat treat without risking the glue joint.

[Flntknp17]

Have you already glued the boo on to the maple? If so you can't give it a good heat treat without risking the glue joint.

You are absolutely right.....I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t think of that already 😂🧐

Question answered 😆

[DC]

Now that I've given you the bad news you can get away with a little heat bending for string alignment and minor tiller corrections. You have to be really careful and it's kind of a last ditch effort. Forget I even said it

[dylanholderman]

With all that being said maple will heat treat just fine. Just you know do it on a selfbow or before you glue them up 

[Pat B]

What glue did you use. Some glues can take more heat than others. TBIII can only handle about 150 deg(F).

[DC]

PROCEED WITH CAUTION!!!!!    I use West Systems epoxy. I needed a little string adjust. I held the gun up close, heated it until I couldn't touch it(about a minute) twisted the limb and let it cool. You don't need a lot of heat for small bends. Hornbows taught me that. Wood is a good insulator so as long as the glue line doesn't get hot you're OK. I've done some tests where I rifle drilled a one inch dowel and put a temperature probe in it. Then I heated the outside of the dowel til it started to get black(about 400°f). The inside was still 110°f. I was expecting the heat to soak in after I turned the gun off but the temp inside started dropping as soon as I turned it off. As long as you remember that this has a big chance of going wrong and you're willing to risk the bow it can help.