What's the optimum moisture content for an ash bow? I know (from reading around and my own experience) that it likes to be dry. After looking at various charts it would appear that dry wood is better in every commonly measured parameter except fracture toughness.
My lacking engineering knowledge (if it can even be called that) then leads me to believe that a very dry stave would perform well as long as its integrity is perfectly maintained. In other words such a bow would have great properties but would be prone to exploding as soon as anything resembling a fracture would appear and would thus be very sensitive to any cracks already present in the wood or induced during the processing.
With this in mind, would it be safe and prudent to dry an ash stave to roughly 5% moisture content - something relatively easily done indoors during the winter?
TL; DR: how much moisture do you like for an ash bow? I've read that 10% is good for yew but ash needs less.
