Skinny osage bendy handle

[Hilongbow]

Aloha all,

I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy.

I'd like to share a bow I finished a few weeks ago. This is osage from a trade last year. The stave was a little too skinny for what I wanted, but despite that, it turned out to be a real shooter. It also had a lot of thin rings with a poor early/late wood ratio. Some of the rings had more than 50% early wood. I designed it so that those rings were the back, and the belly rings had a little bit more late wood. The back ring late wood is so thin, some of the early wood showed through all the way to the top of the ring.

I tillered it to brace, then did a pretty long belly temper, and bent the limbs into a gentle reflex of about 1.5". Final profile after a shooting session leaves about .5" of reflex in the bottom limb and .25" of string follow in the top limb. After resting bottom limb has about .75" of reflex and top limb has about .5" of reflex. I was hoping to get 40# out of it but while monitoring set I decided to keep it at 35#.

There is one section in the middle of the top limb that takes a lot of temporary set during shooting, then recovers later. There was a stiff spot there right before finishing, and I took a little too much off while adjusting the bend. I took a little bit of wood off the rest of the bow to relieve the stress and the temporary set still appears but hasn't gotten worse. It is super quiet and easy on the shooting hand.

Final stats:
35# @ 24"
56" ntn
15/16" x 4" handle with 3" fades
1 1/16" for 4.25" after fades, tapering to .5" tips
D97 string with navajo wool silencers

Front view:


Side view:


Braced:


Full draw:


Profile compared to first osage bow:


Color of fresh osage vs. 9 mo. old osage (I'm loving the color change and the honey color of the aged wood):


End grain showing rings used in the bow:


Overall I'm very happy with how this bow turned out, though I wish there was enough wood to keep it a bit wider. It shoots a 430 grain arrow as hard or harder than my first osage bow, which has a 9# heavier draw weight. I'm looking forward to my next attempt, which will have a similar profile but be a bit wider to allow for a higher draw weight. I just gotta get my hands on a good stave first!

Thanks for looking and take care!

[RyanY]

Awesome stick. Tiller looks great!

[NorthHeart]

Nice bow!

[gifford]

Nicely done, very smooth profile.

[Will B]

Great looking bow and excellent tiller!

[backtowood B2W]

Like it ,tiller looks good!
Why didn't you go for a thicker ring for the back ? Just asking because I would have done so.
Martin

[Hans H]

good Job, nice bend
Hans

[Pappy]

Nice stick,nice tiller, don't take much Osage to make a bow.
 Pappy

[Hilongbow]

Thanks everyone for looking and for the compliments.

B2W: I wanted to have the denser rings on the belly to handle the compression. I figured that a 56" bendy handle bow with 24" draw wasn't going to struggle in tension, but compression always seems to be an issue (at least with the woods I've worked with). I originally wanted the thicker ring above the green outline, but on essentially the last stroke while chasing that ring, my blade took a big chunk that ran down through the early wood of the ring I was removing, through the latewood of the desired back ring into the early wood of that ring, forcing me to go down one more. I couldn't go down past the thin rings because the stave was pie shaped (more extreme is some areas) and I wouldn't have had enough wood had I gone down further. Seems to have worked out well though!

Pappy: Very true! Amazing what you can get out of essentially a splinter.