Your Best Rookie Mistake?

[sleek]

Ha, just remembered, I also made a left handed bow instead of a right handed on accident once....

[bushboy]

Thinking that my wife would be interested in my bows!lol!

[Roy]

I'm right handed and have made myself two left hand bows:)

[sleek]

Wow, we should burry this thread, new guys are gonna read this, think, what a bunch of maroons, and never ask us questions for advice again! lol.....

[JW_Halverson]

"There's no mistakes, just Happy Accidents", Bob Ross

Spoken by an artist working with canvas and paint.  Obviously he's never had a shattered bowlimb ear notch him like a hog in "Ol' Yeller"! And I don't wanna talk about it.

[sleek]

Without pics... it didnt happen...

[Rufledt]

OO fun I made a lot of these.  Let's see... I thought a nice, straight, dense piece of pine would make a good bow.  Tiller looked good, but it took 5" of set. 

I also used some mystery wood for nock overlays.  It ended up being too soft and the string (made of mystery cord I found in the garage) cut right through it. 

I once tried to raise the weight of a perfectly functioning red oak board bow (That's right, fully shot in, 35# bow with 1" of set, and I thought it wasn't broke so I should mess with it) by backing it with a thick strip of hickory, which promptly killed it.

Once I was working on another red oak bow and the tiller wasn't balancing.  One limb was far stiffer, so I got impatient and removed a crapload of wood.  It was immediately unbalanced in the other direction, and only pulling 25# @ 30".  I balanced the tiller out (to like 20# @ 30") and gave it to a friend of mine with kids.  It's so over built for the draw weight they'll never break the thing.  I think it ended up taking 1/4" of set.

That was only in the first 3 bows!  If mistakes are for learning, then I learned a ton from those 3 failures.  It's no wonder why I made half a dozen good bows after that before another failure!  I think that was a lesson in preparing glue joints properly.  More specifically, what happens when I DON"T do it properly...

The most recent mistake was me messing with a functioning bow again (didn't learn my lesson).  I took the first and only penobscot bow I've made to date and replaced the artificial sinew back strings with dacron.  No stretch in dacron, and it chrysaled to death shortly thereafter.  D'oh.

Which one is best?  You decide.  The last one just goes to prove I'm still making a rookie mistake now and then.  What is the cut off for deciding when something is a rookie mistake and when something is a stupid, should have known better mistake?

[sleek]

Hmmm, this wasnt MYYYY mistake, well kinda but not really... I took a bow to see my wifes side of the family down in Florida. We were shooting an old couch in the carport. Her aunt wanted to try, having never seen a bow before in her life. She puts the arrow on the string and just sits there saying " Nothing is happening " . I was too shocked to really say anything other than, " Pull the string back ", to which she does, about half way. Again she says " Nothings happening!"  " Let go says I " I see the hand holding the bow start to let go before I yell " STOP! Let got he string, not the bow ! " She shot finally, the arrow went 3 feet, and to my relief, she went inside...

[bow101]

Lol.........made my share, How 'bout doing things backwards like shaping the handle before tillering is complete.  Ya, backwards is backwards does.  Did 5 bows like that.

[twisted hickory]

Not sticking with wanting to build bows when I was a kid. I got distracted by other things. Here I am 40 and doing what I wanted to do as a teenager.
Greg

[LEGIONNAIRE]

Trying to start of making warbows when I couldnt even pull 70lbs. I was very young back then and for whatever dumb reason I wanted a strong bow. So that caused me to break many bows. I was 14-15 back then, that was 10 years ago.

[crooketarrow]

    I

[crooketarrow]

  I once thought I was wrong but I was mistaken.

  Starting out the first couple years is not slowing down.
  Now instead of makeing a bow in a day or 3 now I might that a month or 3. Maybe longer on personal bows .I always have 3 or 4 bows going at once at different stages.
  I hang the bows on pegs and look at them everyday I go into my shop. If you slow down a look at it a couple, few days. You'll aways see something you did'nt see the day before.

[rossfactor]

I made a 55" Cypress Bow with a stiff handle that pulled 28". Didn't know it wasn't supposed to work cause nobody told me.  Actually was a sweet shooter for the first 100 shots.  Than it blew to Smithereens!  Got me wondering about what was "bow wood."  That was 11 years ago. I still have the remnants somewhere.

Gabe

[Eric Krewson]

My worst and most common mistake when I first started out was to try to cut the back to belly limb profile in one pass on my bandsaw. I was always using osage and often tried to slice off the excess belly wood with the limb standing on edge. I would end up with a limb that would be at my desired thickness on the side that was up and 1/4" thickness on the side I couldn't see because I would have my wood tilted the wrong way when I fed it into the bandsaw.

I ruined several great staves with this goof-up before I learned to cut each side separately with the wood tilted to make a peak in the middle of the belly that I would rasp off later.