Hair brained

[sleek]

My hair length is now 24 inches long  and is getting chopped off on tuesday. The plan is to bind it with either hide glue or a curd glue ( curd is waterproof) and bond it to the belly of a sinewsd bow. I want to turn my hair into an artificial horn and make a horn bow. I will be doing a test first with my beard, as I'm going to shave off all of it as well. The plan is to make a miniature beard bow of bamboo, to learn if the hair/glue matrix will make a solid bond and not eliminate. I will make a small bamboo bow first, weigh it, then bond the hair and once cured, recheck the weight to see if anything has been added.

I cant decide on which glue to use and may try two mini bows, each with pure glue on the belly, to see which will hold the best against compression
on it's own. Then, whichever holds the best, use it to bind my hair to the belly.  As a thought experiment for the process, I know I want a tight grouping of hair, with enough glue to solidly lock the rocks into the matrix and not allow them to fail in compression. I am considering laying strands down like sinew. Another consideration it to lay one big bundle of glue soaked hair to the belly, then wrap the bow with thin wet stretched pouch rawhide stitched along the back to make a seam and set it in the sun. The rawhide shrinks as it dries, squeezing the fibers together and forcing a good bond to the belly. If using hide glue, the hot sun keeps it liquid and forces extra glue out as the rawhide sock shrinks. Once all is dried, I can grind off the rawhide or use wax paper as a boundary. If I use the protein glue from milk curds, that wouldn't work as well, but a thin rawhide sock could still help if I use a hair dryer to shrink wrap it before the glue sets.

Anyways, that's my hair brained idea  and it better work. It took 5 years to grow my hair out, and I'm going bald, so I wont be able to do this again. Best case, It works great and I have a functional horn bow. Worst case, the hair doesn't add any compression resistance at all to the belly and it just there to look like real horn. In case of that I will toast the belly of the core very hard, and hopefully the sinew with a hardened heat treated belly will perform well with my faux horn belly.

[bradsmith2010]

Please video,,,

[Hawkdancer]

Pray tell, how the hell will we be able to recognize you with you hair on the bow and knot your head !
Methinks it will take a lot of glue and work to hair a bow!  Fear not, it will continue to regrow!, perhaps not with the same enthusiasm, but it will grow!  I think hide glue would be better, perhaps TB3 will also work.  A video of the harvesting would be neat! !  Get the oil out of the hair and do it like sinew?
Hawkdancer

[bownarra]

It won't make any difference

[DC]

I'm interested in the glue only belly. I've wondered if an eighth inch of solid glue would work in compression. I'm not sure if adding hair will help since hair itself has little compression resistance. Time will tell. This reminds me of the fingernail project

[sleek]

I'm interested in the glue only belly. I've wondered if an eighth inch of solid glue would work in compression. I'm not sure if adding hair will help since hair itself has little compression resistance. Time will tell. This reminds me of the fingernail project

Honestly, I dont know which way to think here. Hair seems flimsy, but so is woven glass, until you epoxy it. Hair is made of 80% keratin,  the building block of horn, and we all know how awesome horn is. Perhaps locking hair into a matrix of glue like glass in resin will allow the hair to undergo compression loads without flexing.

The other though is the hair wont help with compression loads, but act as a good filler to prevent the glue, which may wind up doing most of the work, from slipping and crumbling. They use hair in concrete for this very purpose and has an appreciable effect on the tensile and compression strength of concrete. The hair may only serve to reinforce the glue, rather than the other way around.  The biggest challenge will be what glue to strand ratio should be used. If the ratio is off, the matrix will weaken and fail.

I do know hair when short enough is strong enough to prick skin, as I experience this when my wife doesn't keep up with shaving her legs. Its prickly. Human hair has the strength of copper wire of the same diameter.I read studies in this and downloaded all kinds of files till I passed out last night reading up on this.

I need to find a way to allow this to dry without molding. Some of this idea is stemmed from an experiment Tim Baker started but abandoned.  He was making a pure glue belly and had a problem with it molding before it could dry. My prediction to him was the belly would collapse under compression. without something to reinforce it. I believe oriented hair strands would direct the stress loads evenly to allow the forces to flow across the belly evenly. Taking a page from the lessons Tim learned, I may have to do this in thin laminated layers, allowing each to cure before laying a new layer on. I hope the shrinkage of the top layer doesnt cause undue stresses on the bottom layer. Lots to consider here.

[DC]

My wife owns a hair dressing salon and she is quite often called on to pull hair slivers out of her employees. I thought this was fantasy so I looked it up. Somehow a strand of hair can poke itself into a calloused foot. They can go in quite deep so there must be some compression resistance. Interesting.
 Do you know how thick Baker was trying to get the glue? I have dried layers that turned out around 1/8" thick when I've made glue with no mould. It's pretty humid here too.

[sleek]

My wife owns a hair dressing salon and she is quite often called on to pull hair slivers out of her employees. I thought this was fantasy so I looked it up. Somehow a strand of hair can poke itself into a calloused foot. They can go in quite deep so there must be some compression resistance. Interesting.
 Do you know how thick Baker was trying to get the glue? I have dried layers that turned out around 1/8" thick when I've made glue with no mould. It's pretty humid here too.

I'm not certain how thick he got it. But 1/8 thick should be plenty thick. Thanks for the info.  eat story about your wife btw, thanks for that.

[sleek]

So, I'm thinking of taking my very first bow ( which lifted a splinter  and a hinge on the lower limb ) and grinding the back down flat until it weights 30#@26, then sinew it until it weighs 50#@26. After that tiller by wood removal to remove the compressed wood fibers at the hinge down to 40#@26. Then make my artificial horn with my hair and laminate the belly and measure any weight increase. Also check for any efficiency changes by measuring arrow speed between before and after the faux horn is laminated on.

Also, I'm thinking about trying on siyahs. It would be neat to get this bow shooting again and take a deer with it as it is my first and fairly sentimental to me. I made it 10 years ago, and to be able to accomplish this would be like a culmination of everything I took 10 years to learn. I finished this bow and hunted with it Nov 18, 2009. I'd like to do the same and hunt this year on that date again. What a satisfying project that would be. Very poetic, sentimental, and a full circle type of thing for me. Especially as the rawhide I have on one limb only to hold the split ter would become the handle wrap, the natural fiber string on it would be a good quiver strap, the Original bow would become the very core of everything I build upon it, just as my bowyer journey has been for the last 10 years started with this bow. Very symbolic all around.

Its elm, was elm used as a core wood for horn composites?

[Hawkdancer]

Good luck on the hunt!
Hawkdancer

[wizardgoat]

Haha please do this.
This reminds me of me telling a bowyer friend when I die he can have my ribs bones and sinew to make a sweet cable bow or something. I have lots of tattoos so my rawhide could cover lots of bows too

[Hawkdancer]

Wiz,
I think there are some sort of laws against the use of that type of rawhide and sinew!  Conjures up bad dreams for some folks!  On the other hand, interesting thought! !
Hawkdancer

[DC]

Then make my artificial horn with my hair and laminate the belly and measure any weight increase.

I'm wondering if you will see a weight increase and if so, will it be from the "hairn". Any increase may just come from any increased thickness. I think what you should be looking for is, "can I bend it any further than with a wood belly and will the hairn take the strain" From what I've read the advantage of composite bows is not so much that it is better, it is that it will bend a lot further allowing you to use ridiculous amounts of reflex. I reserve the right to be wrong

[PatM]

I posted about the idea back in the early days of this MB.  My thought was to use horsehair.

 The problem with trying to make artificial horn is that nobody seems to have figured out how and what nature bonds the keratin together with and duplicated that.

[sleek]

I posted about the idea back in the early days of this MB.  My thought was to use horsehair.

 The problem with trying to make artificial horn is that nobody seems to have figured out how and what nature bonds the keratin together with and duplicated that.

Best as I can tell, it's a molecular bond between the keratin proteins themselves. from an article I read: Keratin is a protein, which in turn is made up of amino acids and cysteine disulfide. The latter makes sulfur atoms form a firm structure called disulfide bridges.

So perhaps a disulfide or even some sodium disulfide binder would be best, if some such thing exists. Perhaps one could be chemically engineered, maybe one that would melt the disulfide bonds, and allow them to reform, taking a clump of hair and bonding it as one solid mass.