Hey everyone,
I know its been awhile since I have posted a bow on here, but I wanted to share this one with you all. It's a 59in red elm Penobscot style bow with a 31in red elm mini bow attached that pulls around 40# at 26'' with the helper bow or around 25# without it. At its widest coming out of the fades the main bow is 1.5'' tapering down to 3/8'' at the tips. After shooting it in, the bow has taken roughly 3/4'' of set. Going into it I really didn't plan on doing this style but I didn't think the tiller was good enough around the 40# mark and knew I would never use it how it was. I was just as unlikely to use it if I dropped the weight way down to fix the tiller too. I decided instead to get the tiller as close to perfect as my skill allowed and then attach the mini bow to get the weight back up using hemp cord. All together there is about 175 feet of hemp cord wrapping on the bow. As far as the performance, I'm happy with the way that it shoots. I don't think that it is the fastest bow that I've ever made, but its a solid shooter. I had been meaning to make a new one of these because while I make no claims of superior performance, Penobscot bows are always the ones that friends who know nothing about archery want to shoot. The other Penobscot I have in my house is one of my early bows that I really can't stand, so at least now the bow they gravitate to will be one I am proud of.
I've made a couple of these in the past and always HATED how difficult they can be to setup consistently since the tiller changes so drastically based on the string tension between the two bows. I tried something different for this one and made Flemish twist strings and put purple heart overlays on the bow. So far I've been able to just keep the strings on the bow to keep the tiller from going to far out of whack and just make minor adjustments to keep the string tension even.
I know other people do them different, but I like to tiller out the main bow fully and just make sure that it is bending a little bit more than I would normally do it in the inner limbs because adding the 2nd bow will stiffen that area some. I took a picture of this one before I added the 2nd bow so I could show the difference with everyone.
Before:
After:
Fulldraw:
Thanks for taking a look at this one!
