Yew Hunting Bow Build-a-long

[Blacktail]

not too bad for a school teacher..LOL..just giving you crap...looks like it will be great piece of work..i love a yew flat bow..it should have a butter smooth draw..john

[Gordon]

I am enjoying your build a long Weylin. Nicely done.

[IdahoMatt]

Nice work.  It's neat to see how other people get things done.   

[Peacebow_Coos]

Lookin good Weylin, I like that 2p-10 too, my buddy gave me whole jug for christmas after elk hunting one year, I went through about 1.5 bottles of loctite.  Gonna be a sweet bow

[---GUTSHOT--->]

Enjoying your yew build along

[Weylin]

Thanks for the kind words and interest. Doing a good build a long is harder than I thought. I hope it turns out helpful. It's hard to remember to take pictures as I go a long. I get into a groove making the bow and it feels annoying to stop and set up a picture sometimes. Plus the lighting and background in my shop are not ideal. I actually have the bow ready to shoot. I'm meeting the future owner at the range today to shoot it in. I'll try to get my build along caught up.

[Weylin]

Now I'm ready to bend in some mild curves in the tips. The bows owner wanted slightly flipped tips but not full recurves which is good because due to the placement of the knots I don't think I could have asked that of this stave. I use a hotplate and a pot to steam my tips. I get the water boiling put the bending portion over the water and cover it up with cloths and the cover. If I had enough tin foil on hand I would have used that but it's not crucial. I'm careful to keep the actual tips with the overlays out of the direct heat. I don't want the glue to be effected. Honestly I think if I had to do over I would have steamed the bends before I did the overlays just to be safe but they ended up just fine this time.  I let these steam for about 45 minutes but honestly I don't think it needs to take that long. I have seen John Strunk steam bows in much less time and bend them no problem. He swore that anything more than 15-20 minutes was overkill. The longer times don't seem to hurt anything though so I guess I err on the side of caution.



I make sure that my caul and my clamps are all set up and ready to go while my wood is steaming. Once the wood is ready I quickly transfer it to the caul, clamp down the tip and smoothly but quickly bend the bow down over the caul and clamp it down.  Watch carefully for splinters starting on the belly and for "hinges" in the bend where it's bending unevenly. The more even the thickness the smoother the bend. It was a bit tricky on this stave because of a cluster of knots near the top tip. Luckily it bended smoothly.



I have found, at least with yew, that a bend that is only steamed in doesn't always want to stay. It will get pulled out when the bow starts getting pulled. So after I steam the bend I take out my heat gun and I lightly temper the curved area. This helps to retain much more of the reflex. Especially because my caul has a backing I need to be cautious about heat getting trapped under the bow and scorching the back. I do a couple things to help. I place a strip of foil along the gap to deflect the heat away from the back of the bow. I also am conscious of the angle of the heat gun so that I am not blasting heat directly down into the gap.





Here it is with both tips finished. Due to the knot on the top limb it didn't come out quite as reflexed as the bottom tip. I had to play around with it a bit and match the bottom tip to the top tip.







There is a bit of twist in the stave that became exaggerated when I reflexed the tips. I adjusted the direction that the tips were pointing so they would line up closer to the center of the bow. I'll let the picture show what I did to make the adjustment.

[bow101]

As always your work is inspirational to mature bowyers and newbies.   

[ajooter]

How much water do ya put in your pot weylin?

[Weylin]

Enough water to generate a good amount of heat and not evaporate away but I keep it low enough that its not splashing water all over the bow.

[PEARL DRUMS]

Looking sweet man. Love that yew.

[Weylin]

I'm ready to start bending it on the long string. I try to keep the long string as short as possible to give a more accurate impression of the tiller. This is my setup. It's not ideal, there are things I'd like to change about it but it does the job for now. I apologize about the background being so distracting, that is one thing I'd like to change but it's not my basement so I have to be conservative about what I set up.



Unfortunately I don't have a third arm and was unable to take decent pictures while checking the tiller on the long string so you'll have to use your imagination. Here is the bow at first brace. I'm pretty happy with how it looks. There are adjustments that need to be made but it's in the ballpark. I see the top limb (right) is flat in the middle but I like the shape of the bottom limb.



Here I am pulling the bow down a bit to see how the limbs are moving. Still a little flat mid limb on the top but getting better. I do not exercise the limbs between scraping like I know some people do. The bow gets worked some when I am analyzing the movement of the limbs but I don't do 30 pulls between scraping sessions or whatever. I think it just adds unneeded stress to the bow that may or may not have a proper tiller yet. I also think that changes register when they're made and that working the bow does not train it how to bend, a proper tiller trains it how to bend.  But there is more than one way to skin a cat and that's just my opinion. I know that people who adhere to that make great bows so more power to 'em! I do follow the basic tillering maxims of never exceeding the desired draw weight and never pulling past a problem that I can see. It's funny how easy that last one is to say but I've found that it's only with experience that I have been able to more faithfully follow it. Especially in this early stage when the bow is barely braced I found in the past that it was easy for me to fabricate and ignore issues that either paralyzed me or had me blasting past problems that I think some part of my brain knew were there. Now that I have more experience I have found it easier to identify and correct problems much earlier than I could in the past.



This may seem obvious to many but I've learned to look at tillering as something of a race against time. What I mean is that every bit of wood that you remove from the bow makes the bow a little weaker and gets you that much closer to your final draw weight (hopefully not beyond!). So if you are winning the race against time it means that your choices of what wood to remove are contributing directly to improving the tiller and not just randomly reducing the draw weight. As long as you are improving the tiller you should arrive at a good tiller before you reach your target draw weight and have the luxury of simply removing wood to reach the weight you want. But if you are removing wood unwisely or indiscriminately then you are losing that race and will likely go past your target weight while trying to chase a good tiller too late in the game. Looking at tillering from that perspective helps me focus on doing as much as I can at each stage to bring me to a smooth taper and subsequently a good tiller.

[Gordon]

Your words about tillering are well said my friend.

[Bryce]

Nice build!

[Badger]

 Good build along and nice looking bow.