vine maple bow dimensions?

[vinemaplebows]

Bryce,

               Well if you are up for it, pick a stave of your liking, tiller it, then heat treat it and show us the gain...a build-a-long of sorts. I love to be proved wrong, everyone can learn from this. I still think the gain you see is from the extra heat that dries the wood more. I call vine maple "our" northwest hickory as it has very similar characteristics....minus the water sucking ability of hickory.


VMB

[Bryce]

A bow wizard Iam not lol but what's a bow? A piece of wood that bends? No magic involved.

Lol NW hickory I like that lol. Well I have 4 bows to make and little time to get them done. It's been awhile sense I've had VM on my bow rack maybe I'll do a build along for that bow along with the heat treating process.
I'm always up for building a bow
I'm gonna stop on this topic I feel we might have hijacked this guys thread :/

[vinemaplebows]

Hi-jack maybe, but it IS all about vinemaple....he's getting more info than he bargain for, which isn't bad I would think......anyway ok.

[randman]

Viney and Gordon, I take any advice from you 2 guys very seriously with a great amount respect. There is no way I can even touch some of the stuff I've seen you guys do. I have on the other hand (in my very limited experience) had just the opposite experience. On the several Hazel bows I've made the heat treatment has been sort of ......mehh....can't really tell much difference except the just unbraced set or string follow slowly springs it's way back out again and that's about it. Not much weight gain at all or even hardening (maybe it's just the hazel I'm choosing?). I don't really get that much weight gain out of Vine maple either (unlike Ocean Spray where I do notice weight gain) but what I do get is more resistance to set AND the ability to fix some of my bad tillering work in specific areas where it might be bending too much....I can toast that one area good and nowhere else and it takes care of the problem pretty good. Hopefully someday I'll be able to tiller without doing that but I'm going to use it when I have to until then.
Then there's been times when I evenly heat treat VM completely on both limbs when I'm almost done with the tillering and I don't have to do much scraping anymore (just to harden it up and temper it - once again not to gain weight but just (in my skewed thinking) to resist set - maybe I don't need to do that I don't know). I've noticed it's very hard to even scrape away much wood once it is treated because it becomes so hard.
Hello Jack

[vinemaplebows]

I think the idea of heat treating is to (in a way) plasticize the belly wood, change the inherent properties of the wood to a harder state, but to make the wood more elastic, or at least to attempt too. I have often wondered if this has to do with a woods cellular properties, sugar content or maybe the ability of some woods being able to adjust to heat as a way of defense in a natural situtaion like wild fires and live through it?  Marc is the master on this, wonder his opinion??? Marc?

[Marc St Louis]

I've never used VM so cannot give any opinions on it.  I do know that I have heat-treated some Elm that did not benefit as much as others did and Elm is one of the best for tempering.  One thing though, heat-treating does not make a wood more elastic, that's inherent in the wood.  It does increase it's compression strength, most likely by increasing the wood's density.  Also the higher the density of the wood to begin with then the less benefit it will have from heat-treating, that's why high density tropical wood species get not benefit from tempering

[vinemaplebows]

Thanks for the reply Marc.

[Gordon]

I like to work with highly tensioned vine maple staves. By the time you have them roughed out the staves have developed between 5" and 8" of reflex. I'll work some of the reflex out by tillering until the reflex is more manageble - like 2". But when I have tempered the belly on bows like this, the reflex comes back and the limbs sometimes twist in unpredictable ways thus making the bow extremely difficult to bring to final weight. I've also tempered low tension vine maple and have not noticed much (if any) improvement in compression. Obviously others have experienced better results - maybe it is the technique they employ or I've just had a string of bad luck. Whatever the case, vine maple naturally lends itself well to nice snappy bows when designed correctly so I've quit experimenting with tempering vine maple.

[vinemaplebows]

Very few times I intentionally look for highly tensioned vine maple....the reason I can't explain here because of "rules" on the board, but with that being said..... I have had the same exact expirience with VM non-tension woods. I can't say that for tension woods as I never seen a need with the amount of reflex the wood retained without it.


VMB

[Bryce]

VM really has a mind of its own.

[Brock]

I took some dimensions off my Strunk built VM bow for a guy on another forum recently....  same??

I would call John Strunk up personally or soak up everything Gordon tells you here.....and then just try it.

[BigNocker]

I asked for dimensions and I got heat treatment.  Typical bowers, know waaay to much about waaay too much. 

Thanks guys!  I'll be keeping my eyes out for a build along.  I got some great information here!  When I said flat bow, maybe I use the term wrong.  I'm not necessarily referring to a rectangular shaped cross section but I'm really referring to limbs that are over 2" at the widest point.  The reason they are more work when hand scraping is the wider the limb, the more surface area to scrape and the the thinner it needs to be to get to the proper weight, again more scraping.  The wider the limb basically increases the amount of tiller time exponentially.  That being said, I now have a 72" grizzly belt grinder that makes things much faster for taking out the bulk of the belly.

Question; How is VM with compression?  Would it be a true statement if I said, "The wider and thinner the bow, the less compression stress."

[vinemaplebows]

Compression wood is still wood, and not bad wood, but there is better. Compression wood I believe makes great reflex/deflex  set up, You already have the deflex, steam in your reflex.


VMB

[Gordon]

Limb width about a 1 5/8" for a stiff handled bow of about 60-64". I make the belly slightly round, but not too much as vine maple isn't as good in compression as osage or yew. But it is still fine bow wood.

[Bryce]

Compression wood is still wood, and not bad wood, but there is better. Compression wood I believe makes great reflex/deflex  set up, You already have the deflex, steam in your reflex.


VMB

FINALLY! We agree on something lol