First off, I was pleasantly surprised to find some pics I posted over 2 years back on page 235 or so of the forum. I though I had lost those when I crashed my HD this past spring.
But to get to the point, I asked this question years ago, when I first joined the forum, without much response, and I'm wondering if anyone has tried since then to use hemlock? We had tons of the stuff growing on our farm in Vermont when I was a kid, and my dad had it sawed up for dimensional lumber all the time. I remember from working with it, that it acted more like a hardwood than a softwood. It was incredibly heavy, hard, difficult to bend and generally a royal pain in the butt to work with. I wonder if it has any properties similar to yew. Now that I'm finally back in the Northeast, I'll likely try it, just to see what it does, but I do wonder if anyone else has ever tried it. I think the Montegnais and Naskapi used some conifer bows, but I don't know if anything but spruce grows that far north. Looking at the USFS distribution map, it doesn't grow north of the Great Lakes/Laurentian region.
