Stiff handle help

[Tree_Ninja]

Hello Folks,

  I'm working on this thick oceanspray stave. It's about an inch wide tapering to about 3/8 at the tips.  About 55" NTN. 

It has some major pull right now so I'm not too worried about losing weight.  Should I give up on the stiff handle idea? I was hoping for 24-26" draw lenght. Would it be too much for this short a bow?

  In the brace pic the right side is the lower limb, in the tiller photo the right side is the top limb (flipped around). So far because of the fades the lower limb is "shorter". I can take off a bit from the lower fade to get it working more.

 It looked like a hinge was developing on the upper(left) limb. So I was trying to get rid of it. After these photos I removed a bit more wood from before and after the hinge. I think Its almost gone now.

 

[Tree_Ninja]

one more with the hinge at 25"

[Pappy]

YEP, you got a bad hinge going on, you should never pull one like that when you see a problem, O well to late now ,about all you can do is take wood off on either side until it evens out or you run out of wood.  :)That is asking a lot for a stiff handle but you might have pulled it off it you had gotten it moving closer to the fads to start with. I would say you can't at this point. Good luck.
   Pappy

[PatM]

If you make most of the limbs work the way those two hinges are working you could have got a 30 inch draw out of it.
 This bow looks like a variation of the "I keep cutting and it's still too short" saying.

[SLIMBOB]

+1 Pappy. You can see the hinge at brace. That would be the time to address it, before you ever pull it an inch farther. You could have seen it at just a few inches of brace height. Fix it then and you have plenty of muscle still in the limb to work around it.

[E. Jensen]

Both sides are hinging

[Springbuck]

  Yeah, Tree Ninja, there is a LOT of that bow that isn't bending.  The "stiff handle" you have going is basically the whole middle third of the bow, and the tips are way too stiff gor at least 25% of  total bow length.  That leaves very little bending limb.

As narrow as that stave was, I would have gone ahead with the bendy handle, but it can be stiff and really short.

[E. Jensen]

I'm impressed with that ocean spray stuff though to take that much hinging