I made this Bamboo backed Yew lever bow with some glued in deflex and 9" levers laminated from steam bent Yew strips.
60# @ 26" but it's been pulled a bit past that. (Not sure how much further it would draw
)
This has been a long term project (There's an 18 part playlist on youtube
) ... I made an Ash mock up first to get the lever geometry right. Getting the string to track nicely was the major problem.
It shot well, but when I lightened the levers, it dropped the string, the bow flexed the wrong way and snapped the Yew belly
But you know me, I didn't let that stop me, I gently flexed it the wrong way, flooded it with Cascamite, and left it under tension to cure with a couple of clamps on it.
I still had to do a lot of work to sort out the string tracking, (I dropped a bit of draw weight too), but I got it shooting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGh0a3aQvJI The whole project was a major learning exercise, I'll try it with some flight arrows sometime.
It certainly demonstrates that even simple joints can hold up as long as they are in compression.
Del
Note:- The break propagated at a small block of Yew that I'd let in on the corner of belly and side to repair a tiny area of rot/knot. This probably helped to get a nice clean repairable break.
