I was so proud of what I had going...
47 lbs at full draw of 27 inches measured from the belly
This is the tiller at 22 inches, the bottom limb (pictured right) is slightly stiffer, but I heard you want the top limb slightly weaker anyway, so I left it as is.
So despite my best efforts it still got a lot of set. It was naturally deflexed to begin with so not all you see is set, but I would say a good inch of it is. It's currently sitting 1.5 inches below parallel. I did the no set tillering method, but I'm guessing my design was just too far off from the get-go. Every time I noticed any weight decrease I would stop and take some more wood off and try again. However, I noticed a decrease about 5-6 times throughout the process. Although I didn't pull past that point when I noticed a decrease, the cumulative effect of noticing those decreases led to about an inch of set. I should have been more precautious and removed a liberal amount of wood and aimed for a lower weight such as 40 lbs. I just thought it should be able to handle it since it was nearly 2 inches wide and more than 2 x the draw length. Despite this I thought i was well within the limits of the bow since many bows are made with more than 1" of set, I was surprised what happened next...
right after the full draw picture was taking, like literally one second, I heard a crack that scared the crap out of me. It didn't break, but I could tell something was off. after searching up and down the limbs I found this. You can tell this one spot has stressed the sinew more than any other spot. My guess is that the back splintered up but the sinew kept it intact.
you can see the bottom limb (now pictured left, sorry about that) is weaker when it was stronger before, and you can tell even in brace profile.
I decided to test it out to see if it was really done for. Here it's 18 inches. and the bottom limb (now pictured right, sorry I wasn't consistent) is considerably weaker when it was strong before. You can probably tell but the issue is around the 4th tile to the right where it is in the shade. surprisingly it doesn't look that much like a hing. But when I tested the weight, it had lost 3 lbs instantly and was loosing more each time I drew it so I stopped. If I took it to full draw now I'm pretty certain it would break. I'm not sure what to do at this point... I could try to fix it with flax, sisal, linen or something, but would it be worth it since the end product, if it did work, would probably be below 40 lbs with more set then it had before? I could try to make a new bow but I don't know how much I could get done in December, it would most likely take a couple of months and I already feel bad for being this late. Or, sadly, I could resign and have upstate get a reserve bow. But I was looking forward to getting one myself, but I understand that if I can't produce then I probably shouldn't receive. I was afraid something like this was going to happen. It was the worse feeling in the world
. I had put more work into that one bow than any other I made. I cut down the tree (and cut myself mind you), it was my first spliced billet, it was my first siyahs with string bridges, and would have been my first real successful bow that hasn't stacked with a butt load of set. Oh well, what can you do? This is the worst part of bow-making. Let me know what you guys think I should do.
