How many bows dont work??

[hunterguy1991]

Hi all,

Got started in bow making seriously a week ago. Since then i have made 2 spotted gum flat bows that failed. learned a few valuable lessons in making (and breaking) these two.

Got me thinking tho... How many bows get made but break in the process or shortly after??

Post a comment of how many bows you've made (roughly) and how many have broke (in the making or after within a few weeks)

Straight shooting

Col

[greybeard]

Over the years I have binned at least a dozen bows covering selfbows, laminated wood and laminated bamboo/wood bows.
Being a bit of a mad experimenter I will push materials and design to the edge. Failures can teach valuable lessons.
Choosing the wrong design for a given timber probably accounts for the majority of failures. Obtaining suitable spotted gum boards can be quite difficult at times.
I have found the success rate is a lot higher when using bush billets.

Daryl.

[hunterguy1991]

Greybeard,

I have been waiting for a post from you since i joined... reading through all of your threads on here, you seem a very knowledgeable and experienced man!!

I am curious about something tho. Do you by anychance attend the Abbey medieval tournament with the New Verengian Guard and know a young guy by the name Alex van Velzen??

Alex is a good mate of mine and has told me about a man called "greybeard" or "daryl" that makes beautiful bows and wondered if you are one and the same??

I could be wrong...

Straight shooting

Col

[greybeard]

Col,

The only time I attended the Abbey was in 2010, however I have several aquaintances including bowyers and fletchers who attend every year.
I believe I am the person he is refering to.

Daryl.

[mikaluger]

Col,

I broke my first three bows.

I spent a LLOOOOOOOOOOOOONG time researching Timber and then an even longer time searching around timber yards and the net, on where to buy suitable timber.

I do not know alot about wild trees and do not have access to areas where suitable trees grow let alone permission to harvest them so I am limited to processed timber.

I would like to use australian timber in my bows not have not found suitable (with good enough grain) processed (milled) timber, so i have gone for boards of American Ash, Maple, Hickory, Elm, Wenge, Ipe(brazilian walnut), and Bamboo.
All with the exception of bamboo is readily available at furniture grade timber suppliers.
All well known bow timbers.
American ash is most plentiful and has very consistent grain examples, it is very strong especially backed with hickory or bamboo, is forgiving and is easy to work. It makes an outstanding flat bow.
My advice would be to search for these timbers and get 2 or 3 good boards, and try again.

Mick

[hunterguy1991]

Greybeard,

Im very pleased to make your aquaintence in that case!! i have looked through most of your posts and have been stunned by your tallent as a bowyer. Absolutely incredible stuff.

Mick,

I would like to try and make some from aussie timbers also, but will most definitely aquire some of the exotic timbers you mention. i'll be sure to post pictures of my successes when i start to have them.

cheers guys

Straight shooting

Col

[KellyG]

Col,

I am really new to this making bows myself. I have attempted 5 bows and only 2 of those were shooters the other 3 failed. The first shooter did end up breaking after I harvested a deer. So for me the odds are not good. However the more I work on the wood the better and more confident I am becoming that I will make better and better bows. Heck the first bow that failed I may be able to make a laminate out of, the shooter that failed later I can still use one of the limbs later if I get another limb and splice them. Well they ever work out don't know until I try. It is just fun to see. Plus getting on sites like this one and getting all the help and encouragement from these guys is a big plus.


Kelly

[GrahameA]

Hi Col.

I have been waiting for a post from you since i joined... reading through all of your threads on here, you seem a very knowledgeable and experienced man!!

Alex is a good mate of mine and has told me about a man called "greybeard" or "daryl" that makes beautiful bows and wondered if you are one and the same??

"Yes", he is that Greybeard. And he has developed his skills to a very large degree - but do not tell him that.

As far breaking bows or having them not work ...... hmmm... I have a collection. Plus I have a few bows that are great bows to shoot and have been salvaged thanks to Daryl offering a few words of encouragement. I have no qualms about sawing out a lamination and then rejoining the bow now. A technique that Daryl suggested and frightened me somewhat the first time around.

On a personal basis the bows are not so much as failures as learning experiences. I have probably learnt more from the projects that did not work as I have from the ones that did.

[hunterguy1991]

cheers guys,

i do see the positive side of the "failures" aswell, and ive already learned a heap of valuable lessons in bow making, and ive only been at it a week!!!

Thanks to everyone on Ozbow that has given me pointers or avice so far, and im sure i'll get plenty more in the future.

keep posting with how many havent made it, id like to do a rough comparison just out of curiosity.

Straight shooting

Col

[bigbob]

Probably about 25 years ago i had three attempts at making a spotted gum self bow for boards, but eventually blew them all before getting a servicable one.In recent times and with glass backed laminated bows I blew the second bow I made some time ago a couple weeks ago.When I laid it up [glass backed laminated] the belly lam slipped down as I had changed riser size but forgot to alter my form. Hence I had no end of trouble trying to get it all trued.When it came off the form it had noticable glue gaps and the belly lam had slipped about 1/2''. I kept it [naturally] and shot that bow at about 5 shoots before the belly lam de-laminated.This was due to all the stuffing about I had to do trying to save the bow once it was glued up.Some of the very high pressures I have seen some American bowyers use with their airhose and forms lead me to believe that they must have some failures due to glue 'starvation' with the glue being forced out of the layers by the pressure, however I could be entirely wrong.

[yeoman]

I have broken hundreds of staves. I am not exaggerating.

When I started, my only source of instruction was John 'Lofty' Wiseman's SAS Survival Guide. Save yourself the trouble and do never bother trying to make a bow as described in any SAS survival book. Also, I was using pine and willow due to their availability...not knowing that the only worse options than those would have been balsa or doormat.

I eventually got a hold of Adrian Hodgkin's The Archer's Craft, and got a few shooters, though they were dismal. Then I got the Traditional Bowyer's Bible vol.1. From that time, I started getting reliable shooters. The rate of failure got less and less.

I still have the occasional failure. Sometimes to a previously unseen flaw in the wood, a heinous mistake with the bandsaw or rasp, or more frequently (as a proportion of the failures, not of the bows made total) glue starvation from clamping too tight. I've just started using Gorilla Glue instead of TBIII. Apparently Gorilla Glue loves high pressure, so maybe the instances of glue starvation will go down.

Unfortunately for Roadie, he has owned the two bows in the past several years that I've made that broke. Both due to glue starvation. The first one lasted a couple hundred shots, not sure how many the next lasted. Maybe he will chime in. I have a replacement in the works that will hopefully hold together.

I haven't broken a bow in tillering in years. And that last one was a takedown that broke right at the sleeve. Nearly took my thumb off.

No matter how many bows you break, do not lose heart. Keep at it. A marginal spotted gum board, with bamboo backing, becomes a very good bow.

Where are you located hunterguy? I'm sure someone on here could be convinced to part with a bamboo backed, ironbark or spotted gum stave ready to start tillering.

Dave

Edited to add - I just remembered another bow. Late last year, a bow from blackbutt. It broke cos the taper in width was too abrupt near the tip, and that's exactly where it broke. Bummer.

[Dennis La Varenne]

Col,

My bowmaking experienced pretty much mirror those of the others above. I have been at it since the mid-1980s and shooting bows for a bit longer.

Mostly I have made my bows from natural staves from the tree where available and prefer that method, but lately, I have been playing around with backed blanks and staves I bought from Rudderbows Archery in the US. He makes Bamboo and Hickory backed blanks of Hickory, Ipé, Red Oak, American Ash and a few of the less common woods for quite reasonable prices.

I am going through a lazy patch presently and having somebody else do all the laying up for me. I have always wanted to see what all the fuss was about with Hickory (there are amost a dozen species, not all good for bows by the way). I have found that Hickory is much better than the old American writers give it credit for. This may be because the Australian climate is less humid - at least in the South East of Australia. I have both self and bamboo-backed bows from Rudderbows Hickory. The selfbows take less string follow so far. My hypothesis is that the Bamboos is too tension resistant for Hickory. Hickory backed Hickory in the form of a reflexed bow would be better.

Ipé is obtainable locally as decking timber but needs to be backed because it is back-sawn like most board timber here. It is very difficult to get quarter sawn timber which does not need to be backed usually.

Bamboo backed, Ipé makes a very good bow, being very compression resistant. I have made 3 now and they are surprisingly quick even without reflex. Kept long and well tillered, it seems to take very little set. Mine have taken only 1/2" of set from the glued up blank stage, one of which started life with 20mm of set after the glue-up. It still shoots astonishingly quickly for a 48lb @ 28" bow which is 70" n-n. I draw 27" on a good day. I have yet to chronograph it.

In the past few weeks, a young bloke on Ozbow has been making a selfbow from a timber available at some Bunnings called Massaranduba (Manilkara bidentata). On his thread http://www.ozbow.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=12641, it looks somewhat like Ipé. He did not back his board bow either. We are awaiting for his next attempt at a heavier bow from the same wood.

Of Australian woods, I have used only a few so far - Eastern Red Ironbark (Eucalyptus tricarpa) from Gippsland in Victoria, although common Red Ironbark (Eucalyptus sideroxylon), Queensland Red Ash (Alphitonia excelsa) and Spotted Gum (Eucalyptus maculata) - all from logs. Based on those Australian woods, I have to say that they are as good as any from the Northern Hemisphere including both Yew and particularly Osage Orange from which I have made the greatest number of my bows.

I have laid up a hickory backed Red Ironbark flatbow in the Perry reflexing method to see how well it works which will be interesting. The last one I made this way was an 45lb ELB with a belly of Lemonwood which took nearly 4 inches of string follow, but tillered beautifully. I applied a Hickory back of 1/8" thick and put in 5 inches of Perry reflex. It turned out spectacularly after it was retillered and sunk from mearly 90lbs down to 62lbs @26". It ended up with 1/2" of string follow after being shot in and sent to its owner in Austria.

I have made 5 ELBs from imported US Yew (Taxux brevifola) which all had the required close growth rings and was a surprisingly hard softwood. (I still have two 73+ inch staves of Yew under my bed.) None of them shot quicker than any of my bows from Australian woods pound for pound of draw weight. Osage is very good, but not better than Red Ironbark in my opinion.

I have compiled a list of prospective Australian bow woods based upon comparing their properties to those of well-known northern hemisphere bow woods. You can find it here http://www.ozbow.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=12750.

It is up to you to start looking and experimenting, then letting the rest of us know how you went.

[greybeard]

Hi Col,

I found two unfinished bows in my workshop.
One is an laminated glass and hard rock maple Asiatic static tip bow drawing about 58# at 12". I know where I went wrong in the design but unfortunately I have run out of options for reducing the draw weight.
The other one is a heavily reflexed all bamboo longbow 68" n t n and the scales indicate it is 60# at 10". When time and inclination permits I will try reducing it to a managable weight.

Further to an earlier post of yours I did meet Alex van Velzen at a small gathering at Jean the Hornmasters' residence.

Daryl.

[hunterguy1991]

Dennis,

Thank you for your words of experience, hearing them just spurs me on even more to get better at the art that is bow making. I'll be looking around over the next few weeks for some of the woods you have spoken about, and definitely be letting you all know how i go with the bows i make. hopefully i'll get a shooter!!

Daryl,

Let me know how the bamboo longbow turns out when you do get around to finishing it. id love to see the finished product. Alex is a good friend of mine, and is just as keen about archery as i am (never thought that possible, quite obsessed) and has spoken very kind words about you and your skills. He was actually the one that got the idea of making bows seriously into my head through attending the Abbey tournament.

Hopefully one day we could get together and work on a bow, id love to watch and learn from someone with your experience.

Straight shooting

Col

[hunterguy1991]

Well, I can add another 2 selfbows to the list of "didnt make it"... both were 68 inches overall, 66 nock to nock, 4 inch handle with an offset (1 inch above geometric center and 3 inches below) and 2 inch fade-outs.

Tried to choose better logs to cut them from, still obviously not quite good enough though. These two were silver leaf ironbark, but both failed short of a small knot in one of the limbs.

just cant quite seem to get it all right...

more lessons learned though i suppose.

Straight shooting,

Col

[Dennis La Varenne]

Col,

With regard to the knots, do you know how to work around them? There is an age-old technique for allowing for them and not compromising the stave.

[hunterguy1991]

yes im aware of how to work around the knots, but there must have been a slightly weaker section below them as a small hinge formed and started a crack on the back of the bow. it lifted fibres just enough while i was exercising the limbs to compomise any strength.

Just have to choose a better piece next time and pay more attention.

[yeoman]

Can you share some pictures? There might be some photo-phorensic information we can identify.

[hunterguy1991]

i have tried but they always come up as being too large to upload... see what i can do.

[yeoman]

If you create an account with photobucket.com and upload photos of any size there, then post a link,it will resize them for you automatically.

[hunterguy1991]

I dont think they will help much personally, just poor timber choice and in-experience on my part. learning quickly though.

These were pretty close and showed just how far timber will bend if done properly (good limb not failed limb).