Just based on some feed back I have gotten there is a couple things I wanted to point out. Getting lower mass than what it calls for is not neccessarily a good thing, a little heavier is often better than two light. Been doing a lot more experiments (making bows) with it the past couple of months since I was asked to write on it and have observed some interesting things. Been finding out that wider bows can often be lower in mass than narrow bows just because there are a lot of crushed wood cells when too narrow that can become dead weight. I kept trying to push my own bows below the weight for performance and it was backfiring on me..
As far as everyone using it goes, thats not important who uses what, just with any method we come up with I hate to see it misrepresented or interpeted, or even worse I would hate to stear some one wrong in thinking that lowest possible mass is best. I had blamed poor performance on overbuilt bows for years and have found out that underbuilt is just as common if not more common. Ultra skinny tips and radical tillers don't make that much difference in performance, only maybe to a flight shooter where an extra few fps is needed. Just keeping your wood fresh and undamaged as possible by having enough wood working seems to give best results. This last couple years I have been working a lot of longer bows than I normally had in my past, I was making them too narrow to start off with and then wondering why they weren't performing, as they were low in mass. This is what forced me into connecting the dots on mass and length and draw length etc, and converting it into a formula of sorts.
Another misconception is that somehow it takes some of the skill and imagination form the bowyer, I would say the opposite has to happen, it forces the bowyer to work at his highest level of skill he can muster and just provides some checks and ballances to check himself with as he progresses into a bow. Countless times I have been working on bows and really excited about their progress only to reach the 24" or 25" mark and suddenly feel my brace height string tension to start dropping because I was asking too much from the amount of wood I had to work with. Using mass is just another tool to monitor progress in a bow and to help a bowyer avoid unneccessary damage to an otherwise successful bow.
I did a little study on red oak bows a couple years ago, at that time my comfort zone for bows was 60" to 64", I knew what mass to expect in that length range. They ranged in width from 1 1/4" wide to 2" wide and all had about equal performance and equal mass. Thats a huge variation, but very common with a lot of wood species. Steve
