Bow design and development

[Stick Bender]

I agree with what you said Steve one of the fastest wood bows I have made & some may remember this bow 65 in. 45 lb @30 1/2 all I could find was construction pics but it was a long riser sweeping faded short limb heat treated hickory  bow with only about 1 1/4 reflex it was flirting with 190s and at times higher and consitant in the high 180s it was under built exsperment with 1 1/2 width limbs but it was very stable fast bow for the first 150 arrows if I had stoped there it would have been a great bow ,but quickly deteriated from there , I often wondered if I had shortened the bow & added sinew what would have happened , but you made my point durability in any design is important , I think 1 size does not fit all with bow design ,Im not a real technical guy but I know there are design differences with making a high dry fire speed bow as oposed to a bow designed to shoot heavy hunting arrows and being durable talking self bows !

[bradsmith2010]

as stated before,,its relative to the application,, a stable fllight shooting bow is one thing, and a stable hunting bow is another,,
I am not willing to give up stablility or longegevity for my hunting bow, if I wanted to flight shoot I would be willing to change my approach as Badger suggested and have a bow that might last long enough to tune the arrows and shoot for an event,,,
so stability can cover a wide range ,,, depending on the application at hand,,my needs are pretty simple and want a bow that wont break down with years of hard use,, so its overbuilt to achieve that "stability",,

[DC]

  DC, when I talk about stability I usually am just referring to a bow that comes back to a normal brace after the shot.

What else can it do? The string stops it. Oh, wait, you mean a stable bow is one that doesn't flip inside out?

[Halfbow]

I'm not having trouble with any of the accepted ;labels.   No need to complicate things with mystery bows and  not knowing unbraced shapes.

You may have mistook my point about the mystery bow there a bit. Was just pointing out that you can't know much about a bow's reflex from its braced profile. I think that's interesting. I guess you don't and that's fine. You can say I'm over complicating things, but I say that bows are going to be exactly as complicated as they are regardless of how we talk about them. And given that the braced profile of a bow is largely what matters for stability, and you can't know much about reflex from the braced profile, there's more to this situation than you seem to be thinking about. I'm sure that hasn't stopped you from making great bows, but I, for one, like to understand as much as I can.

I vote we call concavity of the back at brace "persistent reflex".

Thanks for posting the real world bows & thanks for illustrations Half bow , but this thread has covered a lot of different areas , but my question is how are we judging the designs ,FDC or arrow speed or other ?

Sure! So many areas! I agree with everything being said by everyone on how to judge a bow. I think what Badger said about wood bows is right on. And of course different designs will be better for different tasks. For a lot of this convo I've been kind of drilling down on one concept at a time. Maybe focusing on energy storage in one post, stability in another, etc. That was never to suggest that energy storage is all that matters, or stability is all that matters. (By stability I'm mostly talking about lateral stability. String tracking over the handle, not being overly sensitive to release, no twist in bows with persistent reflex, accurate, low vibration, and certainly no flipping) I like to understand concepts one at a time instead of as a convoluted mash. But of course the bow that stores the most energy imaginable will never be stable, and the bow that's the most stable imaginable will never store much energy. You find these inverse relationships everywhere in bow making. So when you go to actually make a bow, the task is a balancing act of blending all your understandings of different concepts to best suit the purpose you want the bow for and the material you're using.

[bradsmith2010]

then we can talk about what is the best bow,,

[Selfbowman]

Brad .Presently I think it's a pyramid design.  Just saying. Also a flight bow after a couple hundred shots might not be what it once was. Will still be a great hunting bow that last for years. Us old men are not what we once was.  Arvin

[BowEd]

DC....That's what is cool about making bows.A person can work and work and refine a certain design to be the best it can be.Most times it takes many bows and a person can get all the bugs worked out and down to the nitty gritty.Then move on to refine a different design.No reason to get bored.Most every design has it's accalades.Even with the same type wood there will be characteristics about it that make a bow more to your satisfaction.Your tillering skills get refined doing this too.The bows I shot at the flight shoot at Mo Jam verified my suspicions just from testing at home.Those bows had thousands of shots through them individually before the event and still held their own.I like levered type bows myself.

[DC]

I like levered type bows myself.

What do you mean by "lever type"? I've not heard that before.

[BowEd]

Sure you do DC.It's been talked about on here many many times.Straight bows that have a little more extended lighter narrow tips.It's the old function difference of a ball being thrown by hand or thrown by a lacrosse stick.

[DC]

Like a Molle. Gotcha, it's early here. I'm only halfway through my coffee

[Bayou Ben]

Sure you do DC.It's been talked about on here many many times.Straight bows that have a little more extended lighter narrow tips.It's the old function difference of a ball being thrown by hand or thrown by a lacrosse stick.

Like Ritchie's bow above I'm assuming

[BowEd]

I just call them bows with levers.Their more work to make but can be made very durable.

[Stick Bender]

Here is a example of a osage lever bow made like Eds recipe , I made a while back before I cleaned up the leavers still holding original reflex after I would guess 1600 arrows or better in fact ,shooting better after it took more reflex after last winter !

[BowEd]

Thanks Ritch but it's all been done before though.Not really my recipe per sa.I was wondering if you heat treated the hickory bows' working limbs any in your first picture?

[Stick Bender]

Yep I limbered up the fades a littile more and heat treated it but at 65 in with only 1 1/2 width pulling it to 30 1/2 it was to much ,I would still like to try a sinew version of it , was a sweet shooting high horse power bow for a while....lol