I never realized the
extent to which compression effects belly wood until I recently made a boo boo on a bow I was working on.
Tillering along, I thought I could sweat the bow down to the weight I was shooting. However, I didn't take notice that the bow was MUCH heavier than I normally shoot, even broken in. In addition, I hadn't temepered it yet. Yes, I was making alot of mistakes with this one
.
When unstrung after a few hours, it had about 2 1/2" of string follow. Blech! I reflexed it on a form and took the heat gun to it... only to have the belly crack horizontally across the limbs! It turns out the wood had compressed permanently. The heat, which shrinks the wood, simply exposed this visually.
My final thoughts? I've seen heat treating to alot to
prevent excessive set. However, like bending the bow backwards or trying to rebend the bow, all it did was tear the already compressed belly open. Bascially doing nothing good. This bow is going to have to be thinned and dropped in weight, and then the inner, less damaged wood tempered. How well will this work? I doubt it will work as well as a clean, new, undamaged piece. But it should at least work.
When I first started I did bend my bows backwards. It never worked. After I learned this was a bad idea, my father suggested making a brace to store the bows. It seems a natural, immediate response to fixing a wooden bow. But like alot of "common sense" reactions, it isn't really effective!
As for viable sources, Youtube is as as unreliable as it gets. I've seen numerous videos on there that simply shouldn't be available to beginners. Everything from going from tree to fully drawn bow in an hour to cutting through the back to get rid of knots. My advice would be to get
The Traditional Bowyer's Bibles Vol. 1-4
