I was pretty happy when my mother found some linen canvas she had bought 30 years ago. It isn't very heavy but it has a nice undyed colour and I managed to cut some 60" x 1.5" strips out of it. Being the cheapo scrooge I am, I didn't want to waste two strips on one bow.
This is a sugar maple board I tried to make a thin pyramid bow out of. It is 73" long and 1.5" at the fades. It draws a clean 50# at 28" although with the low stacking, it feels like a low 40#er. It has taken more set than I like with 2" just unbraced. This is probably because I made the bow so thin, backed with linen and strung her too quickly. I do have her braced at 8" too so my dad wont be forced to use an arm guard or change his shooting style.
I kept the tips a little more stiff than usual because the linen backing is so short and I wanted to bow to be low stacking.
The tips are cherry scraps from when my dad built a fibreglass canoe 20 years ago. The handle is some mystery wood he brought back from Australia. It was used for fire wood down there, I used it for a riser because of its nice heartwood/sapwood contrast and because it's very dense. He requested an arrow rest and a strike plate so I made one out of a couple of layers of leather. The bow shoots just fine without it on the right side.
The finish is a couple of coats of tung oil.
