This is a bow I made a while ago which actually failed because of a few mistakes I made. Decided to try a fix I would have never thought of without seeing it here. (Thanks Del!)
The story:
A friend of mine gave me some yew staves from a 200+ year old hedgerow. This was a small diameter branch with some knots and a fair bit of deflex (The reflex side was unusable due to lots of knots and wind damage from it’s neighbouring branch)
It started out as a 55 lbs bow but after 100 or so shots a knot on the belly collapsed. The knot goes through the whole side of the limb, I thought is was pretty solid but should have drilled it out instead;-)
After reading Del’s patch stories I decided to give a belly patch a try. (I call it a "Del patch" everytime someone at the range asks me what that thing is on my bow) So I did as Del does and rasped out the collapsed area and made a matching yew patch for it. Quite a challenge to rasp a nice rounded area and make an exact fitting patch! Glued it down with smooth on and sanded it level with the belly. Had to touch up the tiller a bit and left the patched area a little stiff for insurance.
Now to shoot it again after patching was a little scary;-) Shot it a few sessions and to my surprise I had another piece on the belly collapse! This time on the belly of the flipped tip. There was probably a split there wich I had not noticed. The funny thing is it collapsed downwards. (sometimes the belly cracks a bit when bending with heat but that is always a clean break outwards)
So I decided to try another patch on the belly. This was easier to fix because I could just sand the bottom of the curve flat and glue some wood on it. This time I glued on a piece of oak and had it shooting again after two days!
Now this was three months ago and I have been shooting this bow three times a week for two hours per session since! I am usually not into fixing a bow with mistakes but somehow this bow wanted to be a shooter.
Stats:
Wood: yew
Length: 66 ntn
Draw weight: 51@28
Handle: leather
Tip overlays: ipe
// side_profile_unbraced
// top profile
// braced_side
// belly
// Patches
// handle detail
// tip knot
// fd
