Ok, so here's my first attempt at a bow over 100lbs in draw weight. It's been a bit of an adventure getting this thing finished, and I'm not 100% happy with it even now. The tiller I think could be better - the bottom limb could probably do with coming round just a bit more, but it's now quite a bit smaller than the other both in width and depth and I'm not convinced taking any more wood off will help. Somebody mentioned to me that there's a lot of force being pushed through bow limbs at these draw weights, and making one limb too thin is risky so I'm leaving it as it is. Plus as a few people mentioned with the reflex sitting about 8" from the nock it would be a mistake to try and get it to come round to match the other which is what I was trying to do to start with!
It's worth bearing in mind that the photograph of it on the tiller is not quite how it will appear in the hand. It's being pulled from dead centre, and the string is hooked dead centre, so the bending point in the hand will be an inch or two lower, making the stiff limb come round a bit more when it's being shot.
I won't be pulling it to 32" on the tiller as I think that's asking for trouble, but it will be shot to 32". It's just under 110lb at 28" so it will probably be around 125 at 32" which will settle a bit into 120lbs - more or less my goal from the start, although that changed a fair few times!
Anyway. Pics.
Got really lucky with the top nock, it had some beautiful character in it!
I left the cambium on wherever I could, as I love the look of it and I think it lends itself to the appearance of a tool or weapon, as compared to a display piece
This stave had almost no character whatsoever (which is another excuse I can't use for this taking so long and being less than perfect!) but here's about as "crazy" as it gets
Couple of pics of each limb (tricky to take, but you can sort of see the soft reflex that shouldn't have caused me so much trouble but did anyway...
And here's the limb that took the set (around 2" at this point, will probably rise to 3 or so after being shot in a bit)
Here's the unbraced shape - you can see the set it's taken up to where the reflex starts. The reflex was worse of course when I started but it's softened a bit now.
And here's the brace shape - pretty ugly but that's how it came out...
And of course the tiller at 28"
I'm calling a truce at this stage and I'm just gonna shoot the thing and enjoy it, and use the mistakes and lessons learned to motivate me on to the next, better one. Thanks to everybody who offered help either in PM or on the main forum - huge amount learned during the making of this, and I can't wait to apply them to the next warbow.
