Do you count "brokenheartedness" as a Bow Injury? "...how about damaged pride"? "...injured ego"?
I generally don't talk about the ones I manage to break, 'cause I'm supposedly a bowyer. Surely that means I know what I'm doing and don't make such mistakes as might cause a bow to blowup in my hands, ...right?
Well a few months ago my young nephew and I were working on a glue up tri-lam bow, (ERC belly, Hickory backing, and thin lam of dark brown Walnut for a core/power lam). It came off of the caul just as pretty as could be the next day. We checked it all over for any issues with the glue lines and found none. So we shaped the blank down to the rough profile we'd intended to use. It had a good 5 - 6 inches of glued in reflex and was a 71" tip to tip. It looked really good at that point. So, we decided to take it back to long string shallow brace. My nephew was able to pull it back to about 18-20 on the long string, so we figured it was ready for the standard brace height. It felt pretty heavy, but not too bad. Well - as RJ went to put on the short string, he exercised the limbs just a bit with floor tillering, and BLAMMO! ...the whole lower limb just exploded. Post destruction autopsy revealed that there was a flaw in the Red cedar on the belly at just the point where it had blown up. A really smallish knot, but it was punky inside of it and so it folded under compression. The only injury was caused when my nephew and I banged heads together as we reflexively jumped back from the explosion! This one was just traumatic because it had seemed to be going our way for a goodly while.
RJ was not deterred however, he reached over and grabbed another scrap of Osage and started making a kids bow while our heads still smarted from the collision!
OneBow
